The Singles Jukebox

Definitely our favourite singer to have been stolen from Usher by Adam Levine…

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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The iceberg-paced Sam Hunt-ification of country music shows no signs of stopping — and I’m not mad about it. 
[6]

Alfred Soto: A tub full of blarney, guts, and mullets, Morgan Wallen may be indistinguishable from Sam Hunt in a lineup, but he’s even more influenced by hip-hop. Treating the trap beat like George Jones did pedal steel allows him to flaunt a conversational cadence: he’s not smarmy, just chatty, honest about not having enough on his mind but knowing that mind well.
[7]

Samson Savill de Jong: It’s a bit of a grower, this one. First listen I wasn’t very impressed, but repeated listens have revealed its qualities. The lyrics are one — at first I just heard the generic country tropes (“bourbon” “boots” “Chevy” etc), but I think when listened to properly the song tells a story with enough detail that it feels like something that really happened to Wallen. His singing is good too, with enough gruffness to get to the emotions he’s trying to convey. He maybe could’ve injected more emotion, especially in the chorus, but it’s possible that might have just come off as overwrought. The way the rap-influenced drums hit in the chorus are another thing that I came to like, and overall the music sounds good here. Glad I gave this a chance.
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Thomas Inskeep: Wallen’s voice on “Wasted on You” is just as whiny as his lyrics. And as for the click-track beat, the less said the better.
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Al Varela: The double-edged sword of Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous is that there is enough quality stuff on it for you to pick and choose your favorite songs while ignoring the ones you dislike. That’s bound to hamper the album’s quality as a whole, but it has so many excellent songs that show genuine growth in Wallen’s music that I think the future looks bright for him. Unfortunately, “Wasted on You” is not one of the reasons why. I totally get its appeal, and in a way, it represents Wallen’s appeal pretty concretely. A dark, dour song that wallows in its misery and recounts the regret and heartbreak that he feels over the one who got away. Problem is, the song is pretty sluggish and not even all that cathartic. The hook is fine, but the trap-like skitter of the drums and the sour chords make a song that never builds to any real emotional climax. That may be the point, but it’s a lot less memorable in comparison to the other sad drinking songs on the album like “865” and “Only Thing That’s Gone”. I get why this was the song from the album to break out, but I am also a little bummed that it’s probably going to overshadow some of the others that are more deserving of being Top 10 hits.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: This is one of the most effective hook delivery devices of 2021 so far, and it’s got something for everyone, both what they want, and what they don’t realise they want yet. It would really work as just a country song without the trap beat, and it would totally work without the country elements too. You could absolutely give it to any replacement-value R&B singer instead of Morgan Wallen, and it’d also be fine. And damn it, it’s really good as it is, pulling off the trick that Kane Brown inexplicably hasn’t yet. I’m humming and strumming this one constantly already.
[9]

Jeffrey Brister: All of this is so good. Wallen’s voice has just the right amount of beauty and grit, wrapping itself around the guitars and tumbling through the chorus. And then the mechanized, skittering drums kick in, and it feels like seeing a tiny, weird robot make its way across a bar near closing time: a strange and jolting novelty, which after a few minutes starts to looks really cool and like it was always meant to be there. It’s not a new thing, but I haven’t heard it deployed with this amount of restraint, and it takes what is already a pretty good song to excellent.
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