The Singles Jukebox

Despite the title, this sounds nothing at all like “Break Stuff”…

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Thomas Inskeep: This is… odd. Certainly country artists can make pop records — I mean, Taylor Swift, hello. But this, this sounds like Pharrell’s version of tropical house with LBT’s (gorgeous, granted) harmonies on top. So the issue here isn’t actually Little Big Town, it’s that this isn’t a very good Pharrell record. 
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Crystal Leww: I don’t want to sound like that grumpy country traditionalist that says things like “This is not real country music” but seriously guys, this is not country music. That’s fine, too, if it were good, but this is seriously not good. This sounds like a middle-aged crisis — your aunt has had her eighth glass of wine from a box on the cruise ship and has now taken the bag out of the box. She is dancing to a Kygo song and yelling at her friend, “PATTY! PATTY WHAT IS THIS? THIS MAKES ME FEEL YOUNG AGAIN! PATTY, LET’S GO SEE IF ANY OF THE KIDS HAVE ANY YOU KNOW” and then she makes a gesture that lets you know she wants to go find weed. What a massively disappointing follow-up to “Girl Crush.” 
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Alfred Soto: It’s not country, no, and who cares? In its use of wooly-headed harmonies and strategic repetitions it’s closer to Tango-era Fleetwood Mac. Balearic bliss, say, which is why these days Tango matters more than Tusk. But Little Big Town forgot to write the rest of the song.
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Cassy Gress: This owes a big debt to “I Can See Clearly Now”, but it’s unfortunately also quite reminiscent of “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing (In Perfect Harmony).” Just give Little Big Town some Cokes and put them on a hill, and you’ve got your next commercial sensation. Oh hell, Pharrell co-wrote this? This feels so lazy for him.
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Josh Langhoff: Day-drunk and pontooned into a pleasant stupor, Little Big Town emerges from the heat haze bearing Beach Boys harmonies and a little two-chord pool noodle of a song. Co-writer and producer Pharrell takes some lap steel and abstracts it into the beat, his own countrypolitan take on Gulf & Western. Lyrically, though, this jumble of sloshed metaphysical speculatin’ is no “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body.” Someone — God? — needs to remind LBT that if He answers their prayer and sends the rain, it’s probably gonna get darker outside.
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Brad Shoup: If I absolutely had to be murdered on a cruise, I’d want this lightly chopping, evangelically harmonized purgatorial wining music to accompany my demise. Drop the axe; let me ascend.
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Jonathan Bradley: Little Big Town helps Pharrell take “Happy” from the motivational seminar into the chapel. As praise song goes, however, it’s reassuringly secular, or at least nondenominational: these serene encouragements towards prayer and light and new beginnings are bland enough to welcome most comers. (Heathens like me might prefer to stick with Lord Willin’ when it comes to theological Skateboard P collabs.) The vocal, which supposes multi-tracking is something like community, is as insubstantial as sunshine on Sunday morning, and Pharrell’s production leaches the tune of its melody, the remainder thumping along like Bob Sinclar piped through a PA system. There is no joy, only life unburdened.
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Anthony Easton: This is so gossamer-thin: the perfect mid-June, not-too-hot, not-really-thinking, pleasurable piece. The drums are perfect, and the vocals add texture. The pseudo-reggae post-Jesus feel of the last verse matches the first verse’s moaning in a perfect circle and so I can’t even really be mad at its vacuousness. 
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A.J. Cohn: This Pharrell-produced beachy country track, with its bouncy bass line and lush, layered vocal harmonies is good but not great — a little too dreamy and diffuse to be a properly good song of the summer.
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Taylor Alatorre: Even in the late ’60s, pop bands going psych was often a dodgy proposition. Now that there’s no bandwagon to hop on to, I have to wonder why anyone would want to re-enact some of the most regrettable trends of that era, let alone a perfectly fine country group teaming up with… Pharrell? Oh wait, yeah, that makes sense then. The parts of this that don’t crib from “Hungry Like the Wolf” are flighty wisps of nothing; try to grab hold and they slip out of your hands.
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Katherine St Asaph: This is what happens when we watch, fine with it, as radio fills in the runtime gaps on their playlists where rap and R&B aren’t with country and EDM, letting them blur together artlessly. It’s also what happens when we decide that the best use of music is to soundtrack interchangeably “tropical” beach outings. It’s also what happens when a songwriter’s amorphous, context-free idea of “tropical” primarily involves quantized vocal snippets. It’s also what happens when a songwriter has something stuck in his head and can’t identify it as “Like a Virgin.” It’s also what happens when a band plots its future composing music for high school homecoming revues.
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Tim de Reuse: So you’re a musician who’s decided to incorporate elements of a genre that’s way out of your usual comfort zone into your own work. At best, you make it look like the easiest thing in the world and make everyone else look like an idiot for not having thought of it yet. Failing that, you can at least be stylish and confident enough that everyone’s too dazzled to point out the sutures on your Frankenstein-ish monster. At worst, you get an aural sushi burrito: something that works as an elevator pitch founded on surface-level observations but turns out to have fundamental design flaws when actually given form because of a reluctance to commit wholeheartedly to the concept. The perceptive reader likely sees where this is all going, but, hey, to be fair, country music and house music can both be pretty formulaic and overproduced lately, and there’s no reason I can think of that definitively proves they couldn’t play nice together. “One of Those Days” works on a few levels, but as a whole, well… those dotted-eighth synth stabs scream one thing and those top-heavy straining harmonies scream another, and for all the thought that probably went into this it has the sonic character of a lazy mashup.
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Katie Gill: Y’all, I know I just had a two paragraph long rant on Celine Dion but this nonsense cannot stand. I came in here so happy to see Little Big Town. I had such high hopes. “Bartender” was great. “Pontoon” was great. “Girl Crush”… was shit, but it at least served as a useful barometer for which of my Facebook feed was massively homophobic. So yes, I had hopes! And wow were those hopes dashed pretty quickly. This song is just a muddled mess, mixing together way too much Auto-Tune with Pharrell on an off-day. If this is Little Big Town, then it’s the Little Big Town in the universe where Spock’s got a goatee and the Brigadier wears an eyepatch: it’s still the same, but there is something fundamentally and disastrously wrong with it. God I’ve listened to this song like five times to try and articulate just what I hate about it and the end result is that I just hate it even more. You’re Little Big Town, for Christ’s sake! You’re famous for isolated vocals over a guitar-and-drum track! “Day Drinking” had fucking whistles in it and I still loved it! What’s the show choir nonsense you’re trying to put out as a single? Points have to be given for the band trying something different and going out of their wheelhouse. Points have to be taken away because the end result is a major trash pile. I TRUSTED YOU, LITTLE BIG TOWN. I TRUSTED YOU.
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