CLuke Bryan
What Makes You
Country
Capitol
Country bro king Luke Bryan sounds a little defensive on the title cut to his sixth album, whose cover shows the 41-year-old singer sitting by a riverbank, gazing soulfully into the distance.
Bryan is the massively popular successor to Kenny Chesney as Nashville’s preeminent country-pop party starter. He lays the country signifiers on thick — he’s forever “runnin’ bird dogs through the Georgia pines” or driving his truck across the Tennessee line — while making music far removed from traditional country, in his case with smooth R&B, a touch of hip-hop, and lots of songs about how much he likes sex added to the mix. That makes him an amiable good ol’ boy with a savvy understanding of his fan base to his admirers, and an enemy of all that is authentic to detractors.
So on What Makes You Country, Bryan feels the need to re-establish his “dirt road cred” before getting on with making music that, if not for the Deep South in his voice, is indistinguishable from mainstream pop. Crowd-pleasing comes naturally to him, and he has some decent ideas, like the waiting-on-a-text romance “Light It Up” and the live-and-let-live optimism of “Most People Are Good.” But he’s also a cliche-monger, and Country is ultimately a patchy, too-long 15-song collection that mixes cringe-worthy howlers like “She’s a Hot One” with well-constructed hits-to-be (“Drinkin’ Again,” “Hungover in a Hotel Room”) that never let guilt or remorse get in the way of pursuing a good time.
Hot tracks: “Drinkin’ Again,” Most People Are Good”
BVan Morrison
Versatile
Legacy Van Morrison loves making music. Make no mistake, he’ll sing what he wants and put his own imprint on it — and there’s a chance it will be wonderful.
Morrison’s 38th studio album, Versatile, comes on the heels of Roll With the Punches, a tribute to the rhythm and blues influences that helped forge the style that made him one of the world’s greatest songwriters. He may not be in his prime at 72, but he isn’t stopping now.
On Versatile, Morrison veers toward the swinging vibe that has enthralled him at times, applying his signature vocal fearlessness to his own songs, some new and some not, and assorted well-traveled classics. Those include the Cole Porter composition, “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “Unchained Melody,” perhaps the album’s most heartfelt cover.
A gentle re-casting of “I Forgot That Love Existed” does nothing to detract from the legacy of one of his best songs.
The new compositions generally don’t rise to that standard. On “Broken Record,” Morrison at one point sings the title repeatedly — sounding like, well, a broken record. Perhaps the album’s weakest cut, it’s an odd choice for the opener.
But the rest goes down easy, with stellar ensemble playing and just enough free-form adventurousness to keep the loyalists happy — and Morrison, too, as long as he’s singing.
Hot tracks: “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “I Forgot That Love Existed,” “Unchained Melody”
— SCOTT STROUD The Associated Press B+ Cindy Wilson
Change
Kill Rock Stars
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the wildly influential dance-punk ensemble the B-52s, vocalist Cindy Wilson has watched fellow co-founders Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider touch upon solo music outside the B-52s’ quirky frenetic pop and surrealistic lyricism without a peep. Shame that. Alone or with Pierson — one of pop’s greatest harmonists — Wilson’s tenor moves from coolly nuanced and warbly to a scratchy bellow (e.g. “Private Idaho,” “Give Me Back My Man”) for a truly unique signature sound. Only recently has Wilson dipped a toe into solo waters, first with 2017 EPs Sunrise and Supernatural, and now, a spooky, but cheerful, electro-pop album, Change.
Wilson’s music is ripe with tinges of motorik krautrock(an experimental rock style that emerged in the 1960s in Germany, played with a 4/4 beat), French ye-ye (beat music from the 1960s) and heated electro-clash (a fusion of 1980s electro, new wave and synth-pop with 1990s techno, electropop and electronic dance music).
Wilson and co-writer Suny Lyons create non-B-52s fare: the heartfelt “Memory,” the trip hoppy “Change,” the slow, sentimental likes of “Things I’d Like to Say” and “Sunrise,” the subtly disco-ish “On the Inside” — all with southern belle insinuating her signature croon into the mix as another instrument. Moving away from the kink of the B-52s doesn’t mean that Wilson eschews that new wave wonk entirely. While the bop and bounce of “Mystic” would fit handsomely within the B52s’ oeuvre, “Brother” — a warm reference to co-founder-composer Ricky Wilson who died from the effects of AIDS in 1985 — shares the frenetic kitsch of her origin story, while moving her own soulful, nu-electronica forward.
Hot tracks: “Memory,” “Change,” “Things I’d Like to Say,” “Mystic”
— A.D. AMOROSI
The Philadelphia Inquirer
(TNS)