The country legend Blake Shelton returns with his 13th album tomorrow, and we here at Overtone have been excited about this one for a while! I’ve been a fan of him for years, him being one of the first names I got into in the genre, so when we got this album over our desk there was no way I wasn’t diving right in! Though I didn’t get round to reviewing his last release, Body Language, I really enjoyed it, and hope that this holds up to that same quality!
Right off the bat, ‘Stay Country or Die Tryin” is exactly what I wanted this album to be. It’s neo-traditional and with just enough drip of Southern rock attitude. Blake’s voice sounds just as good as it ever has, and he’s written a banger here, packed full of great (if cliché) lyrics and an absolutely MASSIVE, fantastic chorus. It’s everything you’d think when you think of country music, and everything you’d want Blake to put out. From the vocals to the strings to the guitars to the utterly phenomenal mix, it’s all awesome. The album kicks off incredibly strong, and instantly lands a song on our playlist!
Following the opener up with ‘Texas’ was an interesting, yet really great decision. It’s much more of a modern sound to it, reminding me a lot of Kane Brown. However, it is catchy as anything, with a truly fantastic chorus. The call-and-response backing vocals, as well as the harmonies, add a lot to that, and has resulted in it being stuck in my head a lot since I first heard it. It’s absolutely the right choice for another single, and is another massive highlight of the album already. It’s all on the same sort of level, having a darker, smoky feel to it, and is just such a good song!
Oh would you look at that, yet another big ol’ highlight of the album! Another beautiful duet with his wife Gwen Stefani, and a really beautiful ballad. Their voices work so well together, their harmonies being utterly phenomenal. Heck, Gwen’s voice works great on its own; clearly she should do more country music for her solo work! The instrumentation is simple, the main focus being on the duel-vocals, and it’s another insanely catchy song with so many powerful moments. It’s another song that I’m obsessed with and am sure it will be another big single sooner rather than later. If you’re into the ballads, definitely check this one out!
‘Strangers’ is another beautiful ballad, but a bit more higher energy and modern than the previous track, almost giving off more of a Dierks Bentley vibe. It’s all built perfectly around the massive, stadium-filling chorus, and the lyrics are still pretty well written for how general they are to the genre. It’s another sure-fire radio hit like only Blake can do, and is yet another fantastic song!
The following couple of songs, single ‘Let Him in Anyway’ and ‘Heaven Sweet Home’, are two more beautiful ballads. Both are incredible, with the former being emotion-filled and amazingly written. They are a bit religious for me, but that doesn’t stop them from being brilliant songs and me enjoying them a lot. And, in the latter, Craig Morgan lends his incredible voice for another amazing duet. Both are awesome songs and well worth checking out, but I do have to say they did cause the album’s momentum to slow just a tad. Spreading them out, or maybe not having two kinda slow songs before them too, may have made them even better, in this writer’s humble opinion. But it really is a very minor gripe.
The pace picks up again with the awesome, ‘Life’s Been Comin’ Too Fast’. The riff is rockin’ and the song overall has a boot-stomp in’ bounce to it, making it a damn fun listen. It’s a typically fantastic, infectiously catchy chorus, and is easily relatable! It reminds me a lot of his older stuff; that Buffet-inspired, good time country. Again, it’s packed full of awesome string parts and some incredible harmonies, all simple yet so very effective. It’s yet another amazing song and a big highlight of the album, for sure!
‘Don’t Mississippi’ is like a combination of the previous track and ‘Strangers’, having a bit of a slower pace but a bit of umph and rock to it, still. And yet again, it reminds me of the mid-2000s Blake in all the best ways! So does ‘Cold Can’, both have that stadium country-rock feel to it that’s just SO GOOD. The latter is another that feels like exactly what you’d think of when you think of country, and is very much the sort of style that got me into the genre. Both songs are excellent, of course, but ‘Cold Can’ is another of my personal favourites of the album. Heck, we even get an awesome little guitar solo tucked in the middle of it!
Then you have ‘All of My Life’ and ‘The Keys’ that are more ballad tracks again. Both are good songs, but I do find myself preferring the latter. It has a bit more to it, I’d say. However, I enjoyed them both, and even more so because they weren’t surrounded by very similar songs to themselves. They do fall ever so slightly into album-track quality for me, but when the quality of the album is this high that’s hardly an issue. They simply don’t stand out quite as much as the other slower tracks on the album, but they are still great songs in their own right!
The closing track on the album, ‘Years’, is even more stripped-back than the other slower songs, an incredible piano-ballad. It’s also another with a fantastic feature, this time with the phenomenal country legend, John Anderson. It also builds perfectly more and more throughout the track; it feeling massive and epic by the final chorus. While I am still a little bit of a detractor of ‘the slow song should close the album’, this was the perfect choice to end on, being an amalgamation of everything that had come before it on the album. From the massive chorus to the great strings to another amazing guitar solo and some fantastic vocals and lyrics from Blake, it has a bit of everything! And those harmonies in the chorus… DAMN. It’s yet another awesome song, and another I’d recommend to anyone!
Overall: I absolutely loved this! As I’ve said, I’m a big fan of Blake and have been for years, and this absolutely lived up to the high hype I had for it! Every song on this is incredible, and I’d put some of them among his greatest hits, easy. It’s somehow even better than Body Language, and is well worth checking out if you are a fan of him or country music as a whole! I’m a little obsessed with this release already, and am going to be spinning it a lot in the weeks and months to come. Don’t be surprised if it ends up high on our top albums of the year come December!
The Score: 9.5/10