Bryan has expressed stubbornness, even pride, in continuing to release albums that extend past an hour. While the drawn-out onslaught of emotions can set up a uniquely cathartic experience, it starts to wear thin on Bar Scene, where well-crafted tracks bump up against half-baked ghosts of past Bryan songs. “Bass Boat” sounds like an attempt at recapturing the magic of the two-part ballad “Jake’s Piano – Long Island” from last year, but apart from one particularly devastating line—“I was raised by a woman who was hardly impressed/And I carry that shit real deep in my chest”—it never quite reaches the same heights. Bryan sometimes trades jarring specificity for more general platitudes, such as, “Don’t get angry, listen to the sounds/Them good times will find their way back around,” on “Better Days.” Even when he gets into the details, he tends to lean on nostalgic signifiers—Beale Street and Elvis quotes, old Fords and Tom & Jerry, Trans-Am and Kodachrome—in place of more substantive meaning.
There have been many comparisons made between Bryan and Morgan Wallen, the other streaming giant of country music, unabashedly more conservative than Bryan but also a fan of long albums, wistful reminiscing, and authentic presentation. But there are arguably many more similarities between him and Tyler Childers, the Appalachian singer-songwriter whom Bryan shouts out on the very last line of Bar Scene, or Colter Wall, the gruff-voiced plainsman from Saskatchewan, whose song “Motorcycle” Bryan recently covered on his Instagram Story. All three of these men combine a reverence for country traditionalism with the outlaw attitude of the 1970s, to the extent where, when Bryan rails against “808s” infiltrating the country charts on “Bathwater,” it feels redundant.
But if artists like Bryan can match, or even surpass, the stardom of Nashville’s revolving door of country-pop singers, then what exactly is he rallying against? Bryan is now, reluctantly or not, the biggest crossover success in the industry, long past the point of being able to call himself an underdog. “I’m a mechanical bull, throw a quarter and watch me go,” he mutters, with a shrug, early on Bar Scene. You get the sense that, if given the chance, Bryan would fast-forward through all this “fame” business and become a barroom staple, with the kind of songs that people sing along to because their parents did. Only time will tell if he ever reaches that point; as Bryan would know, it takes a few decades to earn a permanent spot in the jukebox.
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Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
