Review Summary: This latest offering from the longstanding country quartet is an especially tame one.
Little Big Town have truly 'seen it all,' as Karen Fairchild says on the effective title track to their newly released eleventh studio album
It's a Dying Art. Formed in 1998, the harmony-heavy vocal quartet have maintained the same lineup in their nearly three decades together, and spent the bulk of the 2000s toiling behind the likes of Rascal Flatts and Lady A before finally ascending to undisputed status as the preeminent vocal group in mainstream country music. Surprisingly, though, their presence at radio, even during their superstar era of the 2010s, has been inconsistent and scant. To date, they have only cracked the top 10 on the
Billboard country charts a total of eight times. Granted, a few of those songs ("Boondocks", "Girl Crush" and the Taylor Swift-penned "Better Man") are among the more notable country hits of the modern era, but their track record at radio doesn't mirror their veritable hall of CMA and ACM accolades. Of course, success isn't inherently a yardstick for quality, nor do I think they're interested in anything like that. I just find their career trajectory to be fascinating. And so that brings us to today, where Little Big Town have released an album that you can only realistically put out when you no longer need to take any home run swings or follow the zeitgeist.
I'll nod and give clemency on the grounds that an act this prolific and longstanding in their genre deserves to do whatever the f*ck they want at this protracted juncture in their career, but that doesn't stop
It's a Dying Art from being campy and even boring at times. It's not bad by any means, but it rarely, if ever, plays to the band's strengths. Sure, they're getting up there in years, and might not necessarily be as able to churn out a raucous performance like they did on "Boondocks" (released all the way back in 2005), but it would be nice if they so much as sort of got their fingertips around the magic of a song like that. "Boondocks" remains their career record, and the best encapsulation of their artistic capability. This album simply isn't that. Opening stanza "Sucker For A Country Song" makes it abundantly clear that LBT is eschewing that uptempo gold for a neutered cosmopolitan territory. It's country music for hipsters, and if such a concept is your thing, Kacey Musgraves is just down the hall having a dry spell. Again, it's not offensive - far from it. It's just not remotely gripping or worth revisiting. Oscillating towards more potential pitfalls, "The Door", which features Jason Isbell, includes a solid vocal turn from Fairchild, who is ostensibly the lead among these four rotating lead vocalists, but the song ends rather abruptly and cuts itself short before it has a chance to reach the crescendo (term used loosely because this music is borderline sleep-inducing) it seems to be structurally working towards.
That brings us to the aforementioned title track (technically) "Dying Art" which brings the group's harmonies to the fore, but it's lacking in distinctiveness. For Fairchild's part, her voice can get rather pitchy when she stops braying waggishly and tries to let it rip. "Over and Over", despite its nice guitar licks on its intro, run into similar issues until Jimi Westbrook takes the lead on the second verse and elevates the affair in a way Fairchild struggles to. The arrangement is nice enough, though. But then Westbrook's voice gets run through a cheese grater on "We Could Have It All," which makes me think I'm listening to a forgotten 70s pop hit. "Long Way To Your Heart" also gets me itching to dock points, with its frustrating sameness in comparison to the rest of the tracks making me beg for a switch-up that never arrives. Mid stage romp "Crickets" is the only real standout here, aided by Phllip Sweet's smoldering vocals, sturdy band harmonies finally shining through, and a cool, assured rock-tinged atmosphere that also conjures pleasant reminders of some of the band's mentioned previous hits.
Repetitive compositions, harmonies, time signatures, you name it. This album is almost the same song thirteen times in a row. Again, adequately constructed stuff, and Little Big Town are a band I still generally like, whose presence in the country landscape I still appreciate. Like we talked about earlier, this is what happens sometimes, when artists have done all there is to do and you attain the license to just assuage whatever ideas you have without pushback or recoil. More power to 'em; trust me, I don't disabuse this quartet by any means. But damn it is this album hard to get through. If you press 'play', expect a lot of tedium. It's serviceable and not much more. "Crickets" f*cking rules, though and it might be one of the band's best songs in a long time. I just wish it wasn't such a jarring outlier.
It's a Dying Art is
good, but painfully unspectacular.
