Woo! Hey everyone, Anthony Fantano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd and it's time for a review of the new Zach Bryan album, The Great American Bar Scene.

This is the newest full-length LP from country singer and songwriter Oklahoman Zach Bryan, who is showing no signs of letting up on his current commercial success streak, earning a number one album with his last full-length LP, that hour-long self titled he dropped last year, the one that had that huge duet on it with Kacey Musgraves, which was preceded by the two-hour American Heartbreak. And now, in 2024, he already has a brand new LP to serve up right here.

If you're unfamiliar with Zach's work, his success recently in the country sphere has been both a surprise and a breath of fresh air during a time when mainstream country music couldn't possibly be more watered down and pop-centric. His instrumentals sound authentic and organic and rustic and tasteful. Not to mention Zach's emotive and forlorn lead vocals, his descriptive and personal poetry a knack for storytelling as well. Even if his last full-length record was a little samey at points, and I don't personally think he has the versatility to keep 2 hours of music interesting, he is still very much a total package type artist and I'm glad he's making the headway that he is in the country lane

On this new record, with the singles, Zach is really sticking to a proven formula of success for him, as The Great American Bar Scene has kind of the same runtime as its predecessor, a similar mix of feature spots, similar instrumental palettes, with a few ambitious instrumental switch-ups here and there. Even the kickoff of this record feels standard at this point for Zach. It's a poem, and a moving one at that, where Zach talks about his hopes and aspirations for the future, experiences he hopes to have, things he hopes to learn. "If I'm lucky enough, I'll understand losing someone close / I'll clench my teeth on New Year's Eve and try to talk to ghosts."

It only takes a few minutes of listening to him to understand that the guy has a way with words that sets himself apart from many of his contemporaries, which of course comes in handy as he addresses a myriad of different themes as well as narrative angles throughout these songs. Be it on "Mechanical Bull," where he delivers a lot of poignant words on family, changing times and old memories with a heaping helping of nostalgia due to the way things have changed over the course of generations in his life. And of course, once again the production is great. It's dynamic, it's rich, it's heavy, just like on the last LP. We have lots of slow, swelling, syrupy walls of guitar and bass and piano.

Further topics and stories on the record include the title track where Zach details a bar fight that for him does not go all that well. There's also "Pink Skies," which is a slice-of-life moment about a funeral and the general goings on with various family members in attendance, which all obviously makes for a pretty moving display. There's "28," which is also a snapshot of a moment in life, very much a track about kind of coming into your own and ending up in life where you should be. We have changing times being depicted on this track through the lens of various bar scenes, too. This song and many others on the record is just sentimental in a genuinely powerful way, especially with the pounding piano chords and wailing fiddles that back things up throughout much of the track. Because the songs on this record aren't just a good read or a good story, they sound fantastic too.

"American Nights," for example, is a jaunty, fun country rocker. "Oak Island's" tempo really moves at a nice clip, and with its opening lines about traveling, working on the railroad, and Bryan's brother being on the run. The percussion sounding like a train chugging along is absolutely fitting. There's also a lovely little duet-style ballad featuring Noaleen Hoffman, which I might even enjoy more than the Kasey Musgraves track.

Deeper into the record, I do think some small issues present themselves much in the way they did on the self-titled. Once again, Zach has given us about an hour of material, and despite that, his vocal approach is still not as versatile as it could be. His muted, sad country boy demeanor doesn't get stale per se, but it does lead to some samey moments that blend into each other in the tracklist.

It also doesn't help that later on the LP, some of the vocal features that appear are not that gripping either. Regardless of how much admiration Bryan may have for fellow singer-songwriter, as well as the boss himself, Bruce Springsteen, their respective performances on this record are kinda sleepy.

The energy, however, on this record picks right up on the performance that is delivered on "Lake Ida," the lyrics on "Bass Boat" being some of the most intense and heart-wrenching on the entire record, and also the feel-good vibes on "Better Days," which is a track all about things gradually improving but also valuing the lows in life as well as the highs. There are some pretty tasteful guitar licks throughout the song from John Mayer, too.

A few more highlights as we continue toward the end of the record here. There is "Towers," which shakes things up with these gargantuan gospel-style choral harmonies throughout the song. There's "Pink Skies" that I mentioned earlier, and also the closing track, "Bathwater," which is very much a to be continued type moment for Bryan here. It's interesting how much the progression of this record, as well as his last, it kind of makes these two feel like sister albums, and he's using these records almost as a means of journaling and updating us on what is going on emotionally and personally during a certain portion of his life. We're really getting with this track a picture of who Bryan is in this very moment with him, really kind of tying the entire album up. It's narrative dynamic in a way, I think is summed up with some of the lines on this track, like "Woke up on the wrong side / of a lifelong fight between / who I was, who I am / and which one's right."

Again, a lot of the tracks on this record deal very much in what is happening right now in the present, things that happened in the past that brought us to this point and where we might be headed in the future. How life, and Bryan himself, and also the people around him, especially family members, how they are changing and evolving in the midst of all of that. So there's that. And I think present day wise, maybe nothing is more telling creatively than another couple of bars on this track. "These songs used to free me / Now there's nothing free in this / Just 808 beats, what we used to be / and back door politics." Bryan essentially is saying that his success and his fame and his music and his creative process have essentially become a prison or a job at this point.

However, I will say this, for an artist who confesses to being, in a way, as compromised as he is on this record, Bryan doesn't really seem to be selling his style, his artistry, and his capabilities up the river. Though I guess given how successful his last record was, he doesn't necessarily need to. However, as much as I enjoyed enjoyed this album and Bryan's ability to stick to his guns in the midst of all of this fame, in the midst of all this change, I could imagine a couple of more records like this getting quite stale quite fast.

I mean, if there is a glaring issue with the album, it's that esthetically and artistically, there's not a whole lot of evolution since his last full-length album. However, with it just being about a year later, it's not like he's given himself a whole ton of time to do that. Which again, leads me to feel like this record over here is like a sister album in a way, it's a chapter two type moment. It's the next episode in an ongoing series. The only thing really kind of keeping it interesting because again, the production and the instrumentals have not switched up that much, nor the vocals, the only thing really kind of keeping things gripping for Bryan is that his songwriting and his lyrics and his storytelling continue to be so good.

Not to mention just how generally emotionally compelling it all is. Which is why I'm feeling a light to decent eight on this new album.

Anthony Fantano, Zach Bryan, forever.