Review Summary: A pleasant, authentic all-American slice of life that hearkens back to what country music does best.
Mainstream country gets a bad rap, and a lot of times it's wholly warranted. If your instrumental or production is too loud or overblown, you can often lose a lot of the foundation that would otherwise keep the whole enterprise fastened and secure. But if you temper the affair with lived-in writing and vocals brimming with personality, you can churn out a decent product. So does former
American Idol runner-up on her latest album
Stages. Alaina only has a few serious country hits to her name at this juncture, most notably the diamond-certified "What Ifs" with Kane Brown and her lone solo number-one "Road Less Traveled" from 2017, but she's carved out a nice niche as an in-demand duet vocalist. Brown (as mentioned), Dustin Lynch, Rascal Flatts and more have all called her up to hop on a song and it's no secret why. Though she may not be the most eye-popping vocal acrobat in the world, she makes up for it with a palpable charm and sweetness. And on
Stages, she takes every chance to show it off, providing one of the better pop-oriented records to hit the format in a while.
We don't come flying out of the gates, though. The album opens with "Babies Raising Babies," which has a neat enough message. "Apples don't fall far from the tree," she says in its initial beats, before yielding the second verse to her brother Tyler Suddeth, who can't sing for sh*t. We had this same problem when we talked about Rodney Atkins and his son a few months ago. I get it's nice to have a loved one make music with you, but if they have no business stepping up to the microphone, what even is the point? Brushing that aside so we can press forward, Alaina promptly settles into her most comfortable artistic territory - innocuous slice-of-life storytelling and clever turns of phrase, best personified on the boundlessly fun and playful "Household." The dipsh*t husband will be all too relatable for female listeners, and Alaina's protagonist struggling to 'hold it together' runs the risk of sending the wrong message (i.e. toiling away in vain for someone who doesn't deserve it), but with Alaina's sassy performance, you get the impression it's not all
that bad, that there's some real love there; it just gets drowned out by the frantic tribulations of building a family.
"The Ringer" rehashes the prior song's template, though shifting to an outsider's perspective, rather than Alaina portraying the character actually enduring the action of the story. And also like "Household," it relies on writing that manages to be intelligent without overly repetitive or tryhard. Such songwriting seems to be a crutch for Alaina, as she defaults to this style fairly often, but her earnest singing keeps things afloat, and the country-as-cornbread bridge is a delightful composition in and of itself. Alaina puts the housewife persona to bed for a fleeting moment on the energetic "If You Ain't Gonna Love Me", allowing the role of pissed off ex-flame to take over. With some purposeful drums giving the chorus a sturdy chassis to rest on, Alaina's vocals have a lot more bite and snark than what we've previously seen, and she sings the fire out of this one. The guitar solo is criminally short, but tears things up during the space in the song it occupies. Later on, songs like "Little Things" bring us back down to earth, quite literally, as this tune in particular is a tribute to Alaina's late father, who passed away in 2024. "Guess we both had a 'come to Jesus,' mine was down here, yours was up there," she laments. As the track progresses, her voice ebbs and flows in a way that actually serves the subject matter. The loss is quite ostensibly difficult for her, but she remains resolute for his memory's sake.
If I had to pinpoint any real problems with the album, and even then it's not a huge deal, it would have to be the runtime.
Stages comprises seventeen songs, several of which were released as singles long in advance of the record, and clocking in around fifty-one minutes. It doesn't
feel super long, as its rather efficient and deliberate with its time. I just tend to get a bit weary when albums start to get overstuffed, mainly because I look at Morgan Wallen's obnoxiously bloated albums that each run close to two hours in length and my stomach starts to churn. None of this derails from Alaina's efforts, however.
Stages is a pleasant, authentic, all-American romp that offers a soundtrack to the best (and the worst) in life in a way that mainstream country music used to do routinely. It's no groundbreaking watershed moment that will somehow convince me the genre is just absolved of all the issues currently plaguing it in its mainstream arena, but it's more than good enough.
Stages is a pretty
excellent set of work.
