ROCK

摘要

Aldean is a country superstar with a substantial back-catalogue, but he's probably best known to music lovers here as the guy who was playing onstage in Las Vegas in 2017 when 58 fans were killed by a gunman firing into the crowd. Maybe that experience changed Aldean's perspective but, whatever the reason, this is an extraordinary album. Country and rock have been merging since the late '60s, but what we have here is a new departure, a guitar-rock dominated album with an unmistakably country vocal at its heart. Lyrically, he delivers all the country tropes - the demon drink, small-town cowboy values, women as angel-whores -but the band exists in territory more usually occupied by riff-rockers.