Zach Bryan – Plastic Cigarette

With controversy on top…

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[4.89]Al Varela: I didn’t get why this of all songs was the one to get the most initial attention from With Heaven on Top. But reflecting on the lyrics, it occurred to me that the appeal is much the same as that of “Something In The Orange” and “I Remember Everything.” It’s a complicated love song where you can tell Zach has feelings for this girl, even willing to give up drinking and smoking for her, but also recognizes how much of his own self-destructive, emotionally distant tendencies are exactly what draws her to him. I really love the comparison to shells by the shore and her fascination with them mirroring that she likes the emptiness that Zach had been feeling since the previous year. Almost like she believes she can fix him in a way. But Zach never feels resentment or disappointment for this revelation. He’s more stuck than anything. It’s not like she’s wrong that he needs to straighten himself out, but maybe she isn’t the one to coach him through it. Messy, complicated, but real.
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Iain Mew: Not many country songs make it to the UK top 40, but this is the third time Zach Bryan has managed it. It makes sense because in sound and approach “Plastic Cigarette” could practically be a Sam Fender song, although he wouldn’t go quite so diffident.
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Will Adams: Gestures towards the anthemic — namely, that hard stop after the title drop — but kneecaps itself by failing to sound like anything but a first demo. The lyrical choices are often clunky (“swim top”?) or obvious placeholders (yes, “Byron Bay” rhymes and fits the meter, but exactly how much time are you spending in New South Wales?), and Zach Bryan sings like there’s someone sleeping in the next room, all pitchy and self-conscious. Of the twenty-five (25!) tracks from With Heaven On Top, was this really the best option to put forth?
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Alfred Soto: What can you do with a singer-songwriter who so insists on the sanctity of his creations that only a 25-song album will do them justice? Banal notions of studio craft matter less than recording the snap of fingers on strings as they articulate chords for the sake of Bryan’s mumbly-yelpy reminiscences.  “Slicked Hair,” “Say Why,” and “DeAnn’s Denim” put across his wary wisdom with greater clarity.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: At this point he seems content to make the same song over and over again; put this against fifty other randomly selected Z. Bryan compositions, 2021-2026, and it’d be hard to pick it out of the lineup. Consistency is, in its own way, a virtue, and over the course of the past half-decade his insistence on hammering the same nails into the same board has lent his craft a certain mastery. His trick, as always, is to pair the prosaic details of road trips and nights out with grand declarations about the evil and good in man. It’s an easy gambit, but it still, for now, works on me.
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Edward Okulicz: Zach Bryan is successful and famous and shouldn’t be able to convincingly perform this song as if he was a shy, modest nobody. But that’s the tone he’s gone for her and it’s quite effective. The song’s quite effective too but you can tell there’s some anthemic desire being suppressed here, perhaps aware that bellowing out some of this song’s sonically mild but lyrically barbed digs at his ex wouldn’t land well. I’m not sure that would have mattered.
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Katherine St. Asaph: “I ain’t written a love song in so long” — strange, for someone so reverent of writing about one’s relationships, Bryan sure seems to like breakup NDAs. Make no mistake, though: “Plastic Cigarette” is ass independent of its creator being ass. The music is busker slop. The lyrics contains some of the worst fauxdeep lines I’ve read in some time, like “You were collecting shells out on the Bay Shore — you know, I was a shell before?” (#whoa #wow), or “Our fathers were never around when we were younger” (the sort of thing “show, don’t tell” was coined for, with the extra syllable on “younger” dragging behind it like a ball and chain) or “I didn’t believe the evil beneath some people you meet out in Queens.” (Fresh Pond? Kew Gardens? Long Island City? Jamaica Estates, if you want to get real spicy with it?)
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Nortey Dowuona: The weakest men will always find someone to drag down with then as they drown. Ms. LaPaglia, I am so sorry for vouching for this man.
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Julian Axelrod: “Plastic Cigarette” is rustic and stirring and vivid, just like 10 other songs on With Heaven On Top. (Maybe his best since American Heartbreak?) If I was Zach Bryan’s manager, I wouldn’t know which song to pick for a single. But if I was Zach Bryan’s manager, that would be the least of my problems.
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