Consumer Guide Album

Zach Bryan: The Great American Bar Scene [Warner, 2024]
Bryan is such an affable singer and fluent songwriter that no matter how fond he is of bars (and between his busted nose and his broken heart he's got his reservations), I suggest he start his promised health kick by attending to his lungs not his liver—cigarettes are killers. Yes he can write even sharper songs and has already proved it. But losing his money to a bookie or calculating the distance between his beating heart and the bullshit on late-night TV, noting that the only outlaw he ever met was in the Marines with him, inviting John Mayer onboard as if he's doing him a favor although Springsteen is obviously a different story, wondering whether God is a person or the sound of laughter in a place he's yet to find, he's self-evidently a country singer who'll be around so long he'll eventually be too big for the category. A-