Review Summary: By adding stadium-ready mass appeal to an innate ability to write catchy pop-country hooks, Garth changes the face of country music forever, for better and worse.
It’s difficult finding a balance between rating an album solely on the strengths of the music it contains and rating it based on its musical legacy. Nevermind is widely hailed both for bringing grunge into the mainstream and being a strong collection of songs in its own right, yet when one considers that it’s equally as responsible for the popularity of mediocrities like Creed and Bush, it’s hard not to view its legacy as somewhat tainted. No Fences takes that conundrum and multiplies it; while it is, no doubt, a strong collection of songs, every popular trend that has dragged country further into the realm of overcommercialized trash music can be traced back to this pivotal release. To judge it solely on its later influence is, no doubt, unfair; while it is far from a perfect album it’s no doubt a strong bunch of country tunes, but to put No Fences into a vacuum away from everything that influenced it and everything it influenced would be to take away the context that made it such a phenomenon in the first place.
The Thunder Rolls is strong opener and a fantastic tune by any metric, the dramatic tension between a violent storm and the discovery of infidelity maybe not the most original lyrical theme, but it’s executed with a cinematic sense of drama that makes it an anthem that’s just begging for a stadium performance, complete with actual thunder played over cymbal crashes and howling guitar. That kind of bombast, which shows itself at various points in the album, is a huge part of what gave No Fences its massive commercial appeal, combined with a neo-traditional bent that owes a clear debt to George Strait. Where the two differ is that Garth has an almost uncanny knack for catchy pop hooks, instantly recognizable earworms that gave No Fences a crossover appeal that Strait would never really shoot for (not that he needed to). Garth clearly has an innate knowledge of what makes a song appealing and his selection of tracks bears this out, each one a strongly penned, catchy tune that’s brimming with likeability.
Strong songwriting notwithstanding, the production on No Fences, while effective in bringing the mass-appeal accessibility of the music to the forefront, is so blatant in its embrace of stadium-rock aesthetic it quickly veers towards nauseatingly cheesy. Case in point: the reverb washed piano that opens and closes New Way To Fly is so irredeemably corny and dated it completely mars what is otherwise a strong ballad. A more subtle example is the snare sound on Two Of A Kind, so awash in hyper-dramatic reverb it sounds like it belongs more on a Journey song, rather than the George Strait influenced two stepper that it is. It’s one thing for an album to sound commercial, after all country is among the most commercialized genres out there, it’s another thing entirely to polish it to the point that it runs the risk of having all life sapped out of it. The exception to all the blatant overproduction on the album is the timeless barroom anthem Friend in Low Places, a song that no doubt is going to be a drunken karaoke mainstay long after we’re all dead of cirrhosis.
Ultimately, it’s probably best to take No Fences simply for what it is: a grand, polished piece of pop-country that never overstays its welcome and provides a consistent bunch of songs just brimming with commercial appeal. That its popularity would make that stadium rock atmosphere almost inseparable from the popular image of country should really only be a minor thought in its evaluation, no matter how many cringes the likes of Toby Keith and Kenny Chesney might induce. Besides, in a genre as enamored with commercial appeal as this one, the descent into lowest-common-denominator mass appeal was more of an inevitability than a risk. And given that the album has enough issues on its own, between the overproduction and a nagging feeling that there’s really no
heart to the whole affair (Friends in Low Places notwithstanding), its questionable musical legacy seems like a minor point in the face of the music itself. As such, although it’s no doubt an important contribution to the history of country, as a musical experience it, like the majority of commercial music, is enjoyable, well-crafted and, except for a few key cuts, unessential.
