…Rhett said to the bro-country song doctors.
[Video]
[3.71]
Anthony Easton: Oh, I know this is lazy. Rhett is a good enough writer to know that he does not have to add all of these lines, all of these details. It is obsessive, and it doesn’t convince as much as overwhelm. What actually works, is where it flirts with the purity of southern cliches–how he sings prettiest, all corn pudding and ambition, or how he tightropes between girl and gurl and grrrl, knowing the social luggage of each of those phrasing, or even how he drawls and drags the last verses of highway. If he went to college, a good prof would tell him to shorten, tighten and edit.
[3]
Alfred Soto: Another week, another crinkly-cute dude drawlin’ and drinkin’ and watchin’ girls shake their moneymakers in tight jeans. Redemption comes in the chorus, co-written by pro Rhett Akins, especially when Rhett announces the arrival of the title hook with a cute arpeggio.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: The verses are built out of bro-isms, desperation and half-filled cups of jungle juice, which all comes off as very very intentional – this seems aimed squarely at college students (or the recent grads refusing to give it up) especially when its frat-centric video is accounted for. It can be clunky…though, to its credit, that awkwardness sorta works in a song about finding the right icebreaker…and Thomas Rhett tries a bit too hard to be with it (“yeah girl, I’ve been digging on you” huh?). Yet the chorus is twisty and lithe, even if Rhett’s Now And Later bit betrays the hook’s confidence.
[5]
Josh Langhoff: My keen sociologist’s eye tells me there’s genre significance in Rhett using Girl’s college major as a pickup line, even if her field’s as unlikely as Rhett’s major in the masturbatory arts, emphasis in horndoggerel. Not sure if that makes this wriggly specimen post-Bryan, post-Chesney, a model of countrypolitan’s nü-aspiration, or what. Pretty sure I heard this beat on the Braxton-Babyface album, though.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: I am tired of the same bland country songs with the same bland dudes hitting on the same bland girls in skinny jeans. This one can’t even sing.
[3]
Brad Shoup: He needs some of something; you can practically hear him endorsing the state-fair checks. Like so many country tracks on this theme, the guitar melancholy does even more work than his flappy gums. But I can only take so much foreplay, Tom.
[4]
Thomas Inskeep: Every single bro-country cliche of the past five years is present and accounted for here. Vile.
[0]