Review Summary: She's a maniac in the bed, but a brainiac in her head.
If Kacey Musgraves's recent release
Golden Hour caused an invigoration of interest in and potentially an increase in respect for country-pop music, Keith Urban's tenth studio album
Graffiti U acts as the proverbial Anti-Christ, not casually defecating on country and pop music so much as dumping a truckload of manure on it. It's a trend anyone following Urban's music has been seeing coming for a considerable while: his previous two releases (2013's
Fuse and 2016's
Ripcord) have seen a noticeable degradation of his music into less country-focused instrumentation and increasingly pop-centric productions, poorly done ones at that.
Graffiti U only continues the decline a step further, with the mixing on the album lacking any sense of brightness or life. Whether the producers were unaware of the concept of stereo width is to be determined, but it seems very likely given how many of the instruments are just mushed into the center of the mix.
Messy production is essentially an expectation with Urban's music at this point, but the sheer lack of focus when it comes to artistic vision is uncharted territory for the country singer. At 50 years old, Urban continues to display the sort of generically sappy lyrical sentiment that has become his trademark over the years, but laced into this now is a feeble attempt at portraying women as more than just objects of romantic interest. Needless to say, a songwriter who has spent his entire career doing just that to women is going to struggle immensely with that, and indeed, the results are nothing but a putrid club banger dedicated to lecturing us on how attractive women have brains too, strange as it may seem ("Gemini"). The lead single "Female" would be lumped into that category as well if it actually made a single substantive point; you know, because evidently women aren't smart enough to warrant a song about them having substance, right Keith?
Returning to the artistic vision point, there is so much to unpack here that one review isn't going to do it justice. We could talk about the various R&B artist features that do nothing on their respective songs but sing for half a chorus or so. We could talk about the totally unnecessary intros that "My Wave" and "Texas Time" possess, intros that are meant to sound like casual demos but sound as blatantly premeditated as they come. We could talk about "Texas Time" being one of the worst songs of 2018 so far, thanks to a talkbox that blares throughout the entire second half of the track, growing in abrasiveness with each passing second until your headphones/speakers of choice commit seppuku in a final act of protest. We could talk about the WTF ending to "Steal My Thunder", where the song ends to be immediately followed by a "hidden" guitar solo, which fades out into several minutes of silence until we are interrupted by Shy Carter spitting some nonsensical bars about "booty" for 50 seconds, ending in a series of giggles. We could talk about all of this, and whether or not this is really Keith Urban's idea of artistry. But why waste our energy? Chances are, none of you are going to listen to
Graffiti U to begin with because, well, it's Keith Urban, and it's 2018. This, my friends, is a wise decision.
