Zach Top – Cold Beer & Country Music
Jake Owen thinks Zach Top will ‘change the entire format in the greatest way since 1989’. In March Zach landed an interview with Country Music People, a magazine which exists to promote music that clings to the traditional sound, and came across as someone who will win over fans one artist at a time.
When I first heard Sounds Like The Radio, which is gaining traction on country radio in a way that seems calculated but clever, I agreed. On it, Zach calls the old sound (and thus his own) ‘a little bit of fiddle and a whole lot of country gold’. Its very first line includes the word Chattahoochee, which seems calculated but clever.
The sort of music Zach makes, with acoustic instruments and allusions to the old-time music of the pre-rock era, has been a background hum in mainstream country music. While FGL and Luke and Aldean and Sam and Morgan cranked up the guitars and synthetic drums, potential stars like Mo Pitney, William Michael Morgan and Charlie Worsham have been reduced to niche concerns.
Even a fake country band called Midland that was basically a country version of The Archies or Blue Mink had more success than those three with a honky-tonk sound! It wasn’t financially prudent to launch someone trad into this environment, unless they were called Chris Stapleton, who will headline The O2 this autumn having already played there twice as part of Country2Country. In any case, his sound is far more rock’n’roll than country gold.
And so, a decade after Stapleton came through, five years after Luke Combs started playing arenas, three years after Drake Milligan and Randall King brought back the neo-traditional sound, and at a time when Beyoncé has the biggest song in the world, comes Cold Beer & Country Music.
The sound of the album has been created with Carson Chamberlain, who has been a steel guitar player, songwriter, tour manager and artist development officer. Using four decades of experience with Keith Whitley and the Class of 89-ers Clint Black and Alan Jackson who took Whitley’s place on the radio, Chamberlain crafts 40 minutes of music that, as with Jake Worthington’s album, self-consciously looks back to a simpler time.
There’s The Sun (‘there’s the moon, and there’s you), for instance, could have been released in 1995, and I am annoyed it took me 18 months to hear it since it was first released. Paul Overstreet, who wrote Forever and Ever Amen with Don Schlitz, was in the room for two songs: Dirt Turns To Gold, a piece of father-to-son advice with a toe-tapping beat and the innocence of Check Yes or No; and Ain’t That A Heartbreak, which has a Garth-y arrangement and a set of lyrics (‘a world turned upside down’) that Zach fair shrugs at, as if misfortune is part of life and all its wonders.
He offers both types of country song: happy and sad. The former include the title track (‘I don’t need to talk! I don’t need no shrink!!’), the funky line-dance-ready romp The Kinda Woman I Like and Things To Do, where Zach’s narrator asks when his lady can stop fussin’ and cussin’ and let him get on with fishin’ and drinkin’.
The weepies include: the troubadourin’ Cowboys Like Me Do, which is the politest romantic rejection I’ve heard for a while; Lonely For Long, in which our hero offers himself as a fella should the opportunity arise; Bad Luck, a woe-is-me ballad which goes heavy on the dobro; and Use Me, which could be a Vince Gill song, on which Zach begs to be loved and then reveals his own intentions that I will not spoil.
There’s even a lyrical masterclass on I Never Lie, written with the great Tim Nichols (who wrote Live Like You Were Dying), where Zach piles up a list of statements but can’t admit to getting over his ex. I believe every word, mainly because Zach has learned from the best about how to express emotion through singing.
A happy result for Zach would be for him to exist in the same country firmament as Kane Brown, Carly Pearce and Chris Stapleton; there’s plenty of country to go around.
Oliver Anthony Music – Hymnal of a Troubled Man’s Mind
If you come from nowhere and have a Hot 100 number one smash, you had better surround yourself with people who know what they are doing. With support from Jamey Johnson and production from Dave Cobb, the man born Christopher Lunsford has definitely done that.
There are ten original songs, none of which are Rich Men North of Richmond, interspersed with eight pieces of scripture. This was apt given that the album was released on Easter Sunday, which gives it a sort of concert-as-sermon feel. Early adopters will know the material, but it acts as a sort of clearing of the throat before he moves to the next stage of his career. I imagine he will have been put into rooms with Johnson and other A-Listers, who will help guide his talent into a more commercial, but no less hearty, direction.
Cobb uses similar production techniques to those he used with Sturgill Simpson, keeping the sound organic and, as ever, starting with the vocal and working out from there. Lunsford’s holler is perfect for the holler, and Cobb gives it a bit of echo for extra oomph. A fiddle plays in concert with his guitar on Doggonit, a working man’s blues that rhymes ‘democrat/bureaucrat’, while his resonator echoes naturally on the lonely pair of I’ve Got to Get Sober and I Want to Go Home.
He accompanies himself on VCR Kid, where he seems to be giving himself a pep talk based on the child he used to be: ‘I bet you a dollar when you look down in that holler, you’ll be smilin’ like that damned VCR kid.’ There are thrashes of electric guitar in Cobwebs and Cocaine, which reminded me of The House of the Rising Sun, and a stomp to Hell on Earth (‘put my ashes in the creek and let me float on by’).
For all his pain, there are shards of light: on one track he is Feeling Purdy Good and on another he says to his beloved that he will Always Love You Like A Good Old Dog, where he rhymes ‘boy named Sue/ making them stew’. I love the opening simile: ‘Honey you’re like the crack of dawn in the dead of spring’.
Without Zach Bryan to kick the door down, Lunsford’s project would likely have stayed a niche concern, but the music industry is more about luck and timing than talent. It’s up to Lunsford to decide whether or not he wants to follow the rest of the blokes who do full-throated Appalachian Country to fame, fortune and festivals. I don’t think anyone would object if he wants to follow up this set with another mix of scripture and soul.
A Country Way of Life 