Our Songs of the Week column looks at great new tunes from the last seven days and analyzes notable releases. Find our new favorites and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist, and for other great songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, a closer look at the state of country releases from Kacey Musgraves and more.
New and Notable:
What Does It Take to Go Country?
It seems like everyone is going country these days, and it’s not hard to figure out why — as more and more people are waking up to just how profitable this corner of the music business can be, artists from across genres are tossing their cowboy hats in the ring. The latest to make that leap is Machine Gun Kelly, who has shortened his name to mgk for his most recent genre switch.
Unfortunately, “Lonely Roads,” despite featuring artist Jelly Roll’s best efforts, isn’t great. The interpolation of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” feels at odds with mgk’s vocal tone, which can’t seem to shake the shadows of his pop-punk era. mgk is from Texas, yes, but it takes more than a zip code to sound at home in country music, and while we all can’t all be as locked in as Beyoncé, “Lonely Roads” feels a bit more like someone jumping on a hot trend than a love letter to dusty back roads. (I’d rather give mgk’s Zach Bryan cover a spin today; even if it doesn’t eclipse the gritty, quiet honesty of the original, it suits him quite a bit better.) — Mary Siroky
King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Go Hog Wild
There’s always been a bit of manic energy at the heart of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Their restless approach to songwriting — and their commitment to never doing the same thing twice — helps ground their haywire experiments in more appealing ways than overwhelming ones. Such is the case for “Hog Calling Contest,” the second single from their forthcoming 26th(!) album, Flight b741.
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The Gizz can be dark and brooding, and as they’ve shown on their heavier releases, their sound can be impenetrably dense. But on “Hog Calling Contest,” the Australian quintet go for a full acid-laced, country-fried hoedown, quick on its feet and a hell of a lot of fun. The band employs thick harmonies with not a lot of space between the notes, but the vocals end up being less important than Stu Mackenzie and Joey Walker’s buzzing, bewildering guitar work.
It’s a bluesier turn for the group, especially given their more experimental, synth-and-or-heavy-metal trajectory of late. Still, it shows that King Gizzard can take any style, any atmosphere, any moment — a literal hog calling contest, for example — and make it sound entirely their own. Everyone’s favorite chameleons have transformed once again, and they make rolling around a muddy sty sound like a blast. — Paolo Ragusa
