Still obsessed with death…

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[6.00]

Ramzi Awn: “Better Dig Two” benefits from a soft touch on production, and Kimberly Perry’s voice is properly ghostly.  The bridge is a highlight, but the chorus sounds just a little too much like something that’s already been done.  Still, the track makes the most of The Band Perry’s signature grooves from start to finish, and doesn’t wear out its welcome.
[6]

Anthony Easton: For when the Hunger Games does not have nearly enough Appalachian Gothic. The best thing about it (and it might have been the best thing about “If I Die Young”) is how seamlessly it marries the neo-traditionalist obsessives to the pop culture junkies, and makes the synergistic style beautiful.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: Like a lot of hyper-romantic songs, it’s full of categorical statements that if they were spoken seriously in a face-to-face conversation would be warning signs of unhealthy attachment, if not expressions of outright psychosis. I’m pretty sure the Band Perry weren’t meaning to draw a portrait of guilt-tripping overdramatic codependency; but I can’t find another reading that keeps the song interesting.
[5]

Patrick St. Michel: It’s a song about devotion turned into obsession, and The Band Perry’s music matches the mood really well. The fingerpicking hints at bad revelations to come, but “Better Dig Two” also turns loud, becoming a commanding song to match the narrator’s hold on the relationship. The dramatic fiddle seals it.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Lot of interesting words. The word “crutch,” which doesn’t really carry the connotation they want but OK. The explicit meth reference. The way Kimberley pronounces “gravedigger” as something uncomfortably close to a racist slur. The banjo/clap combination is great terrain, exploded by Charlie Daniels Band-style power chords. The air of doom is thick, but surprisingly, there’s no implied peril for her betrothed, which muddles the title and the conceit.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: A murder ballad where the murder’s only threatened, where the heroine’s beset not by ghosts or curses but potential divorce or cheating, punishable by at least one death. Perry sings it like a marital spat, and the guitars lash out at the arrangement.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The mordancy of the subject matter mitigates the trad arrangement, a dialectic which would be no big deal in a folk number but is subversive for their fans. What we’re left with, though, is an intimate number given steroids for arena treatment.
[4]