Unlike many of his country contemporaries in the 2020s,
Zach Bryan embraces naked pretension. The opening track of
The Great American Bar Scene -- a title that consciously echoes that hoary literary cliche of the Great American Novel -- bears a parenthetical distinguishing it as a "poem" which, in all practical purposes, only means that instead of murmuring this song,
Bryan chooses to clearly enunciate every one of its lines in a deliberate recitation. None of the other 18 songs on
The Great American Bar Scene are explicitly stamped as a poem, but they sure are poetic, plump with purple imagery and plaintive rhymes. Three studio albums into his major-label career -- a discography that's also littered with indie releases, non-LP singles, EPs, duets, and live albums -- he gets itchy if he hasn't issued new music in a couple of weeks --
Bryan's emphasis on the lyrics is now familiar, as is his tendency to mumble his way through his melodies, a tactic that often finds his stories getting swallowed by his artful acoustic atmosphere.
Bryan makes some effort to combat this tendency here, opening up his production to faint echoes of heartland rock and occasionally shoring up his meditations with a suggestion of a backbeat -- "Oak Island" actually works up something resembling a head of steam -- it shifts in arrangements that help give
The Great American Bar Scene a more discernable shape than
American Heartbreak or
Zach Bryan. Still, it's telling that it takes cameos from a pair of rock superstars --
John Mayer helps sculpt "Better Days,"
Bruce Springsteen haunts the corridors of "Sandpaper" -- to help pull
Bryan's aspirations into focus: where the rest of the record seems caught in its own head, these tunes have a forward motion that makes the rest of
The Great American Bar Scene seem relatively bereft of musical imagination. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
![Pulp Fiction [Music from the Motion Picture]](http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/0008811110321_p0_v1_s90x140.jpg "Pulp Fiction [Music from the Motion Picture]")
