![]() And yes, I’m not going to complain about pedal steel or how good the fiddle sounds on ‘Blame It On A Backroad’ or the harmonica on ‘Ya Heard’… but let’s not make this more than what it is, and in the snippets where this album shows how it could be more, I wind up disappointed. ![]() Which is frustrating because ‘Heaven Right Now’ is a storytelling moment with more pathos and proves, once again, he can make songs with more of an organic narrative punch, and after the success of ‘Marry Me’, you’d hope he would double down… but no. And that’s a little surprising to me - Thomas Rhett’s father was an artist active in the mid-90s, he knows what this sound is, but his ‘return to roots’ is not especially convincing when the other artist he references most frequently is Eric Church, who across the majority of his career I would describe as country-adjacent, at best! It’s hard to escape the feeling that this ‘return to roots’ is more about the fact that this sound is rising in popularity in Nashville rather than something for which Rhett has an affinity, and that makes the attempts to match with his own thinner sound full of obviously programmed percussion and fake handclaps kind of awkward, especially with the super-in-front vocal blending that is distractingly inorganic, especially with the higher backing vocals - honestly, despite feeling more pop I’d argue Life Changes feels like the album that’s more authentic to who he is, especially as he already had the settled family man songs on that project! Because it really is the content that feels most frustrating, because like on previous albums it’s way too easy for Rhett to default to list-driven tracks that aren’t far removed from his bro-country days - and ‘Put It On Ice’ is pretty much that - swapping in neotraditional signifiers along with mildly embarrassing moments like ‘To The Guys That Date My Girls’ which he just can’t sell. well, to be very blunt, it sounds less like Luke Combs and more like Thomas Rhett adding the faintest dash of neotraditional country to his pop-leaning sound, which does on average make it better but not nearly as interesting as it could be. But if Thomas Rhett was using this opportunity to make something with a little more organic warmth and more diverse songwriting, I wasn’t against the idea in principle. ![]() Thomas Rhett - Country Again Side A - I could be really snarky about this album, starting with the question of whether Thomas Rhett was ever making the sort of neotraditional material for which he’s aspiring now instead of flitting between pop country, bro-country, and the offense to human dignity that was Tangled Up. ![]()
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