billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 28, 2015 (VIDEO)

Oh wow, this took way too long to get online - again - but I'm overall happy for it, if only because it gave us 'Bills' by LunchMoney Lewis. Got to love it.

Next up... probably Modest Mouse or AWOLNATION, we'll see. Stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 28, 2015

You know, it's rare that I get to be surprised much when it comes to these charts. I mean, sure you get your weird stuff that'll show up every week, but seventeen weeks into Billboard BREAKDOWN, it takes a lot to really pique more interest. This week, however... well, I'm not really going to say I was surprised by everything that happened, but more than a few times I was perturbed enough to wonder if things were slightly out of the ordinary. Granted, going into next week given what I've heard about streaming data, I've got a good idea what's coming, but it's always kind of nice to be thrown off-guard a little.

video review: 'sundown heaven town' by tim mcgraw

I honestly don't expect this review to get a tremendous amount of traffic... but then again, you never know, and I wanted to say my piece on Tim McGraw anyways.

Okay, next up... you know, I think I'm about ready to talk about Opeth, but I might need something in the middle first... okay, stay tuned!

album review: 'sundown heaven town' by tim mcgraw

It's hard, as a critic, to talk about some acts with which you grew up. These are bands that are lodged in your formative psyche and though you might not have heard the songs for years, you still remember every line as if it was yesterday. Despite the fact I have not listened through a Shania Twain or Garth Brooks or Alabama or Sammy Kershaw album in years, I can still remember the songs whenever they inevitably come up at karaoke... well, okay, it's mostly the Shania Twain tracks because of every girls night out party ever, but the point is that I find Come On Over a hard record to judge because I grew up with it and she dropped twelve goddamn singles thanks to songwriter and future Nickelback producer Mutt Lange.

And this is something of a similar issue with Tim McGraw, one of the most popular and successful country acts of all time thanks to a quiet, sensitive middlebrow sensibility and a knack for hiring good songwriters. Unlike contemporaries Alan Jackson and George Strait, Tim McGraw has been using the Nashville songwriting machine for decades now to make material I like to describe as an auditory Xanax, especially around the time of his long-lasting marriage to Faith Hill in the late 90s. The funny thing is that Tim McGraw was a good enough performer with a strong sense of populism, so while he barely wrote any of his albums, they still managed to produce pretty damn solid singles that stuck in the memory.

But in recent years, Tim McGraw has been in a bit of a complicated situation behind the scenes, and it's shown through in his music as he's struggled to keep up with the times. The larger issue was with his label Curb Records, which milked his name into the ground through a pile of increasingly redundant greatest hits albums that traded off his late 90s success. Eventually he was able to claw his way out of his contract and move to Big Machine with Taylor Swift, but the artistic flailing on that record was noticeable. And sure, 'Highway Don't Care' was okay, but 'Truck Yeah' was easily the stupidest song he had ever released, leaving that 2013 record a bit of a mixed bag. And off of the opening single 'Lookin' For That Girl', which featured some of the most egregious Autotune I'd ever heard in country song, I was pretty concerned. That said, he did manage to return to his comfort zone of middlebrow tracks with 'Meanwhile Back At Mama's', a duet with his wife that was pretty good but not exactly inspiring considering Miranda Lambert made 'Automatic' this year, so I didn't have any idea what to expect. But I figured, 'Hey, it's Tim McGraw, and at the very least my mom would appreciate me doing this review, and I need to improve my YouTube demographics testing', so I gave Sundown Heaven Town a couple listens - what did I get?