Restless Road - Last Rodeo

For a debut record, Last Rodeo is at times a solid effort.

Restless Road’s tight, three-part harmonies shine on the stripped down, college football-doused ‘Roll Tide Roll’, easily taking the cake as the album’s standout.

Other high points come with the rock-leaning ‘Easy for You to Say’, radio ready ‘Sundown Somewhere’ and ‘Leave Them Boots On’, which hones in on the traditional country band sound forged by the likes of Alabama, Diamond Rio and Lonestar.

At other times, Last Rodeo sees the trio attempt to fill the Florida Georgia Line-sized hole left vacant in the genre, with tunes like ‘I Don’t Wanna Be That Guy’ and ‘Tell Me Not To’ sounding like deep cuts from the duo’s back catalog. For what it's worth, it works.

However, at 18 songs, Last Rodeo is simply too long and vastly overproduced. From the first seconds of the album’s opener and title track, you’re hit by a project that’s heavily layered with with instrumentation and vocals that are stacked to high heaven, creating a cluttered feeling throughout.

What results is a large amount of the album rendering itself rather forgettable, as the band sifts through different phases of relationships, from exciting beginnings (‘Head Over Heels’) to fiery endings (‘10 Things’) and the ideal conclusion of ‘Growing Old With You’. Along the way, they also throw in must-have party songs, with the drunken singalong of ‘Bar Friends’ and the painfully cheap, tongue-in-cheek ‘No Can Do’, which is grammatically incorrect in the cringiest way.

None the less, while there's much work to be done along the way, Last Rodeo still manages to pave a viable path forward for the young trio.

6/10

Restless Road's 2023 album, Last Rodeo, is out now via Sony Music Entertainment.

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