Music Reviews

The definition of playing it safe.

It’s currently 11 PM here and I have to write a review for something that CLEARLY didn’t have much effort put into it in the first place… So this is gonna be just mostly me ranting, but yeah, I’m just waaay too tired to get fired up over a lost potential like this one here, more then mad at this I’m just dissapointed – though that implies I had any expectations for this going into this which let me clarify I didn’t. I knew exactly how this was gonna sound and I got exactly that – so maybe even disapointed isn’t the right expression I’m looking for here. No, maybe what I meant to say is that I just COULDN’T CARE LESS. And that’s coming from someone who really defended his early stuff – his 2020 effort „Ugly Is Beautiful“ is still in my opinion vastly underrated and had some of my favorite musical moments from that year on it. And while a lot of the stuff on there was a bit too generic or un-inspired, the tracks that did pop out REALLY popped the frick out. I mean songs like „Me, Myself and I“, „1993“ and „Jerk“ just to name a few still hold up to this day. And there I was, a 2020 me completely naive thinking that Oliver had a bright future ahead of him – I really wanted him to succeed you know, his meme personality combined with the killer production made for something that not many people were doing at the time – I’m not saying it was anything innovative or ground breaking or anything, but it sure made for a collection of banger songs that didn’t took themselves too seriously and weren’t afraid to go nuts with the production. Unfortunately this new album is like the polar opposite of that – these songs have nothing intresting going for them, they are bland generic pop wanna-be-country garbage that are on top of all that SUPER safe. Like these songs don’t take any risks whatsoever at any point on this album – they always stay the same and it’s so frustrating, because I really tried my best to like this album but I am so immensely bored by this thing, it puts me to sleep everytime. Some „stand-out“ tracks (if I had a gun put to my face and had to pick) would probably be the opening „Cowboys Don’t Care“, like the one passible track on here, „Things We Used To Do“ which has a nice sentiment to do, but just fails in execution and finally maybe the closer aswell as the title track „Cowboy Tears“, maybe like the only instrumentally intresting song – why wait the whole album to actually put something intresting or different on here for a change will probably forever remain a mystery, but the track is for sure one of the highlights, if you can call it that. But I mean that’s like it for the positives – the production isn’t even like offensive or even bad, it’s just so boring and uneventfull I don’t get it. It’s whatever I don’t wanna waste my time and sleeping schedule on this any longer, I am slapping a juicy Strong 3/10 on this and going to bed (probably putting this album on just to fall asleep even faster).