Steven Tyler
“Love Is Your Name”
#75
Most country acts have given up trying to sound like Aerosmith, but I doubt if that’s a consideration for Tyler, who has always sounded fashionably out of time. In this case, though, he also sounds like he’s barely in the room. I’d love to hear Tyler tackle some the raunchier songs in the country canon, but this made-to-order pablum is a terrible mistake.
Meek Mill
“Lord Knows”, #88“
Jump Out The Face” (featuring Future), #91
The classical chorus (Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor) on “Lord Knows” is overkill and more, but Mill makes something of it, using it as a polished reflection of the song’s main theme: runaway success—he only wanted a few backup singers and ended up with a choir, just like he only wanted a new Mercedes and now has a mansion—and what a person who grew up in poverty makes of it. He’ll never top the line from “Monster” about the money turning his noodles into pasta, but the less flippant approach of “Lord Knows” achieves a striking dramatic power all the same, even if Mill takes it too seriously overall. On “Jump Out The Face”, meanwhile, with the help of fellow controlled substance connoisseur Future, Mill details the breadth of his drug use, much of which appears to be in the past tense. I wonder what the money turned his drugs into?
Meghan Trainor Featuring John Legend
“Like I’m Gonna Lose You”
#95
The fifties feel is still there, but this time it isn’t the hook, and “Like I’m Gonna Lose You” slides by pleasantly and inoffensively enough without ever catching your attention. Like many singers, Trainor’s personality disappears when she turns to crooning (as if to make up for this, she throws in a trademark “Hey!” that sounds completely out of place), and John Legend has always been a crooner, so…
Elle King
“Ex’s & Oh’s”
#96
The voice is both rough and cutesy, a neat trick if not always a pleasant one; the music a simplified and fuzzier version of The Black Keys. The song itself lacks subtlety not only in its double entendres but in its overall approach. I try not to let the fact that King is the daughter of one of my least favorite comedians bias me against “Ex’s and Oh’s”, but there’s something irredeemably fake about this record, and it’s a lot more than the title’s faulty spelling.
Old Dominion
“Break Up With Him”
#99
You lost me at “Hey girl, wassup?”