Sugarland—”Stuck Like Glue”
#20
When I heard that Sugarland was claiming steampunk influences on their new album, I expected the worst: something both cutesy and overwrought, pretentious and bland. Instead, we get a charming, though not brilliant, love song, driven by a human beatbox who sounds something like a small industrial sewing machine and a bass line that drives like a piston. It sounds like no country record you’ve ever heard, and yet it’s still recognizably country, a neat balance of the modern (postmodern?), and the traditional. In other words, they seem to have gotten the idea of steampunk just right. If it were a bit shorter (when you depend this much on catchiness you need to be careful not to overstay your welcome), and if Jennifer Nettles didn’t feel the need to do a Christina Aguilera impersonation in the middle, it would be almost perfect.
Asher Roth—”G.R.I.N.D.”
#79
I could do without the preachy spoken bit at the end, and Roth’s feigned off-handedness bugs the hell out of me, but this is surprisingly mature and tougher than I would have expected. “The American Dream is a pyramid scheme” is not the sort of comment you anticipate coming from a guy who has been as lucky in his career as Roth (it doesn’t quite fit with the optimism of the rest of the record, either). He may be smarter than I thought—which doesn’t mean he’s as smart as he thinks he is.
Kenny Chesney—”The Boys of Fall”
#96
Surprisingly elegiac for a song about a game as violent and chaotic as football, but then Chesney isn’t Hank Williams, Jr. It’s so perfectly crafted that he almost gets away with it, and this is pleasant and easy to listen to. But the match of subject matter and approach still jars, and all the craft in the world wouldn’t justify its six and half minute running time. Chesney isn’t Brad Paisley, either.
Shinedown—”The Crow and the Butterfly”
#97
They get the emotional tone of this heavy metal weepy just right, but they do it by the book, so the tone doesn’t carry much emotional weight, and like too many metal bands they think they’re creating meaningful ambiguity by leaving important information out of the lyric. If you’re going to hook a song around the idea of being “a little too late”, you need to let people in on what you’re too late for. I also have my doubts about whether crows actually chase butterflies.
Rihanna featuring Slash—”Rockstar 101″
#99
I like the fact that Slash’s guitar is used for atmosphere rather than flash, and the ominous tone is impressive. But there are better ways for Rihanna to show how tough she is, and the middle eight is all wrong; I’m not sure what type of song it might fit in, but it isn’t this one.
