Review Summary: Boot Americana with Hat Americana tendencies
Have you heard? Country music is going through an identity crisis. It’s left town, changed its phone number, started hanging out with trendy inner city professionals, and only answers to the name “Americana” now — and that’s without mentioning the whole split personality thing…
Whether or not you subscribe to Steve Earle’s thesis that what is commonly marketed as Country-with-a-capital-C music in the 21st century has become “mostly hip-hop for people who are afraid of Black people”, comparatively more interesting is the ripple effect the changing face of country music has had. Music that would’ve been squarely pegged as “country” a few decades ago has, in an effort to shed some of the baggage associated with the term, collectively rebranded as “Americana”. Typified by the god-given sonic primacy of six steel strings, the early 21st century has seen Americana march ever westward in a sort of musical manifest destiny; incorporating blues, country, Appalachian folk and roots rock into a nostalgic, if oftentimes amorphous, potluck meant to evoke cultural memories of rolling hills and wide-open plains.
Some may be intimate with the terms “Egg Punk” and “Chain Punk” — hyper-online nomenclature jocularly developed to intuitively group punk acts into one of two distinct but undescribed aesthetic lineages. In 2023, a keen observer may note a similar dichotomy has emerged in Americana. Let’s use the terms “Boot Americana” and “Hat Americana”.
Boot Americana lies close to the earth — it’s a barroom floor sticky with alcohol and blood and the dust kicked up during a night of revelry. It’s stepping onto a lifted truck; it’s flipping up the kickstand on your motorcycle. It’s a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-headed tale of a hard-living hard-day’s-work. Boot Americana is for the Steve Earles and Gillian Welchs of the world.
Hat Americana, though? Hat Americana is the head in the clouds. Hat Americana is eyeshadow and sequins; it is the ornery fringes and cashmere tassels on a pink and white cowboy duster. It is wistful crooning delivered with a wink and a sigh by someone too emotionally aware for the haircut they sport. Hat Americana is for the Honey Harpers and Orville Pecks.
We’ve taken the scenic route to get to the erstwhile subject of this review, but there’s a reason for that. For the last few years, Zach Bryan has been steadily building a following with his down-home brand of throwback Americana. Almost overnight, 2023’s self titled
Zach Bryan has turned the 27-year old into a household name. The question of the quality of Bryan’s music (it is inarguably well-written, produced and arranged), then, lies secondary to explaining its almost universal appeal. What is it that makes Zach Bryan so goddamn
magnetic?
Despite the tough-guy persona suggested by
Zach Bryan’s lit cigarette and regulation haircut, Bryan manages to blend enough vulnerability into his songs to play cowboy chords on even the most delicate heartstrings. Confessional, introspective lyrics delivered with a voice that swells and breaks against the red dirt levee of Bryan’s chord progressions seem to almost pre-empt criticisms of Bryan’s behaviour. Like the archetypal school bully with a heart of gold, Bryan makes no bones about being, at the very least, a deeply flawed person — but one who is at least self-aware, if not occasionally trying to countermand the more destructive impulses within himself.
Sonically, Bryan also deviates just enough from obvious expectations to pleasantly surprise listeners while maintaining a sense of familiar homeliness in the architecture of his songs. Aside from the immediacy of barn burners like “Overtime” and “Fear and Friday’s” (god that errant apostrophe hurts), the softer tracks that appear with increasing frequency over the album’s runtime, such as “Jake’s Piano” and “Tourniquet”, incorporate textures reminiscent of 00s indie acts like Bon Iver and Bright Eyes. The convivial Bryan seems at his best when bouncing off others, and the handful of duets here also play to that strength, most notably “Hey Driver” with The War and Treaty, and album highlight “I Remember Everything,” which sees Kacey Musgraves drop by to help Bryan launch the chorus into the stratosphere. By the time rueful closer “Oklahoman Son” has torn the breath from Bryan’s voicebox, he’s painted a sonic landscape akin to a regional hub midway through the transition into an urbane metropolis; a universal yearning for a past that maybe never really was, superimposed upon an ideal that may never yet be.
Singing like a man eternally on his last night of shore leave, alternately ebullient and penitent, and sometimes both, the ex-military, square-jawed Bryan
should be the poster boy for Boot Americana. Dig a little deeper, though, and even if you don’t strike gold, you’re sure to find an unanticipated richness below the surface. By stuffing Hat Americana sensitivity into Boot Americana packaging,
Zach Bryan almost comes out with a whole outfit — and in the process, offers a listening experience that will be equally as arresting for hands calloused and manicured alike.
