Kane Brown - The High Road

In the spirit of Kane Brown’s titular high road, let’s start with the good. Like its predecessor, Different Man, there are some true gems on this characteristically genre-fluid fourth album.

Brown is excellent when he leans into the texture of his voice, allowing its country depths to breathe freely via understated production on breezy, beachy summer songs such as the Margaritaville-tinged duet with his wife Katelyn, ‘Do Us Apart,’ or the vengeance-with-a-smile tune, ‘Back Around.’ The fiddle on pleading-lover track ‘Stay’ sounds organic rather than a tool for country music lip-service as often heard on radio-bound songs these days, whilst the acoustic sorrow of ‘When You Forget’–about an aging family member–is genuinely touching.

Brad Paisley duet, ‘Things We Quit,’ could confidently sweep the floor of any honky tonk, and the rousing arms-around-your-neighbour swell of ‘Says I Can’ elevates its own melancholy into a dancefloor singalong. Even the extremely dated snaptrack on ‘Beside Me’ is forgivable in its catchiness and its sweet expression of gratitude for the support of his wife, the simple production showcasing the low scoop of his voice.

Is the messaging of these songs frequently redundant and the sound suspiciously familiar? Yes. Are those the hallmarks of some of the most popular songs of the last 50 years? Also yes.

What ties them all together is the sincerity with which they’re sold and this is true of Brown, too. What really brings his best songs to life is the genuine enjoyment with which he sings them. Genre blending may be lucrative, but there’s no doubt that he sits up straighter, enunciates clearer and rounds out his vowels a little more lusciously when he’s singing songs that sit comfortably within the confines of the country genre.

Alas, we must come to the bad.

When it comes to genre blending, of which Brown is undoubtedly one of country’s most prolific proponents, part of the problem with The High Road is that it’s rarely elegantly done. Subsequently, the overpowering sourness of some of the more cynical additions dampens the potency of finer ingredients, jammed jaggedly alongside each other in a way that’s less blended and more plonked.

At the midpoint, particularly, there’s an extremely lackluster blob of pop-leaning songs with the very occasional lick of country or R&B that do a disservice to the punchier runs on either side of it, not least in Brown’s apparent lack of enthusiasm in singing them and their lowest common denominator production. ‘Start A Fire’ is a prime example of one of his mumble moments, when he seems as tired as the song itself, whilst ‘Body Talk’ is something that would just about scrape its way to an Ed Sheeran B-side. The Khalid duet ‘Rescue’ and its successor, the Jelly Roll duet ‘Haunted,’ offer nothing except themselves as additions to the catalogue of “uninteresting but inoffensive songs you’d hear in an uber.”

Brown is often cagey and introverted, giving interviewers and the public little insight into who he truly is. That’s fine; as Humphrey Bogart said, “You owe the public nothing but a good performance.” The problem is that, like many country megastars, Brown wants us to buy into his brand of doting father and husband without giving us any real sense of who he is in that dynamic.

This reticence is why otherwise sweet songs, like the gentle ‘Backseat Driver,’ are little more than pleasantries. What almost spills into an interesting conversation with his young daughter about the inequities of life, demonstrated by his daughter’s questions about the homeless man who they give a dollar to after a morning at McDonald’s, quickly degrades into a saccharine list of reasons to just focus on life’s simpler questions. As an ode to his love for his daughter it’s nice but… we know. We’ve seen your Instagram.

“I am, I am, I am,” he insists repeatedly in the opening track. Am what? Outside of some very familiar songwriting cliches that could apply to everyone and no one, it’s unclear. He’s scared of growing up and scared of growing old. The waves are crashing, sticks and stones abound and there’s a road ahead of him, all presented amidst some overdone pop-rock production.

This album will likely be a hit, which is unsurprising in our monoculture which values aesthetics and quick digestibility, as demonstrated by the behemoth that is Brown’s newest Marshmello duet, ‘Miles On It.’ It’s not completely undeserved. The better efforts might stick with you, and they should bolster Brown’s success, but next time, he’d be better off focusing his efforts on depth rather than width.

The road may be high but it’s also long–18 tracks long. Better, then, to build an audience that asks “Where next?” rather than “Are we there yet?”

5.5/10

Kane Brown’s 2024 project, The High Road, is available everywhere now via Sony Music Entertainment.

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