Review Summary: Coun-try harder.
Going into this album, I was a bit worried. Not because I thought I might be let down, mind you: I knew perfectly well that this album would be bad. This was, after all, the same walking pituitary gland who stunk up the charts for nearly a full year back in 2017 with the excruciating “Body Like a Back Road”, and the bits and snippets I had heard of his other songs certainly gave no indication that Mr. Hunt was capable of much better. No, what I was worried about was that I would find myself unable to adequately assess its merits. For all my excursions into both classic and modern country music over the past two or so years, I still don’t exactly fancy myself an expert in the field. Would I really be able to tell if the claims that Sam Hunt is fearlessly pushing the genre into previously-unexplored territory held any water based on my somewhat limited experience with bro-country? Or would I be hopelessly out of my depth, unable to articulate my feelings on an album I had a less-than-complete frame of reference for?
As it turns out, my fears were, for the most part, unfounded. Because upon listening to
Southside, I discovered it quite neatly fits into a genre I’m much more familiar with: yelpy 2010s millennial pop. Don’t be fooled by the slick, sterile banjos ‘n’ fiddles, folks. Sam Hunt belongs not with contemporary country singers like Tyler Childers, Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell, or even really with twang-pop pretty boys like Kane Brown or Hunter Hayes. No, Southside is, to my ears at least, much more comparable to the flashy, sugar-rush mainstream popsmiths of five-ish years ago- your American Authors, your Echosmiths, dare I say even your Tove Los. Sam Hunt seems to fancy himself country music’s answer to Drake, but here, if anything, he’s the Imagine Dragons guy wearing a ten-dollar cowboy costume.
Listen, really listen to these songs. Imagine “Young Once” with Dan Smith’s slightly overwrought British accent and presto, it’s a Bastille song, no further changes needed. Ask yourself if those warbling synth-vocal chirrups in the chorus of “Kinfolks” would sound more at home behind Garth Brooks or Adam Levine. Consider just how naturally “Drinkin’ Too Much” would slot into a Twenty-One Pilots album, right down to the humiliatingly earnest spoken verses. And if you enjoy any of the artists I’m name-dropping, rest assured that Hunt hardly manages to elevate their respective styles through his unenthused, grumbly vocal delivery or his clumsy insertion of pandering country buzzwords. Like I said, my knowledge of current pop-country is far from encyclopedic, but if even half of it is as interchangeable with its city-slicker contemporaries as
Southside is, it’s a wonder Music City still bothers with its fascistic control of country radio.
But, even assuming for the moment that references to Nashville and whiskey and a butchered vintage honky-tonk sample are enough to make an album “country”, this album is, put lightly, not exactly the second coming of Waylon Jennings. I’d love to say the meatheaded ‘hips like HUH-NAYYYY’ sexuality of “Body Like a Back Road” was
Southside’s songwriting nadir, but the oversharing drunk text-isms of “Drinkin’ too Much” and the leering, pushy “Hard to Forget” both give it some stiff competition, and the condescending “That Ain’t Beautiful” leaves all three in the dust with a sniffy, judgemental excoriation of some girl who Hunt thinks is, I don’t know, partying too much or something. Country is a genre that tends to lean hard on lyricism and songcraft. Many of the best songs in the genre are actual stories, real or imagined events spun into sharply detailed, immediately memorable tunes. Sam Hunt’s woefully underdeveloped songwriting on this album isn’t particularly impressive regardless of context, but within the confines of country music it fares even worse.
Hunt’s saving grace as a songwriter, and arguably the foundation of his entire career, is his ear for hooks, and
Southside does indeed come up with a handful of passable pop choruses. “Body Like a Back Road” is still insidiously earwormy, and “Kinfolks” and “Hard to Forget” are at least competent in their construction, despite all of them suffering from the same shoddy production that plagues the rest of the album. And hey, “2016” manages to muster a whiff of convincing country flavor for a tolerable slow-burn of an opener. I could see that being one of the weaker songs on a half-decent mainstream country record. Other than that, this thing is a total wash. The songs simply can’t scrounge up enough pleasing melody to counterbalance the under-cooked and consistently douchey songwriting, the atrocious mixing and mastering, or the grating, already-outdated melange of genres and styles. If you’ve heard even a single country song with a snap beat and more than 15 minutes of pop radio in the last 7 years, rest assured that not only is
Southside nothing good, it’s not even anything new.
