"Golden": Lady Antebellum

If Lady Antebellum has a space cleared for a third Country Album of the Year Grammy, it surely won’t be for this album.

There’s no question why Lady Antebellum has seen as much success as they have in the last few years. The trio boasts beautiful harmonies and a proclivity for whiskey-ridden breakup tracks. Its song “Need You Now” is certainly a classic.

Unfortunately, its fourth studio album, “Golden,” doesn’t deliver the punch needed to be a memorable summer album. Instead, the tracklist feels top-heavy, bogged down with forgettable tracks.

The album opens with “Get to Me”, which offers their trademarks: loneliness and whiskey with a good hook you’ll find yourself singing in the shower.

While this song sounds like it sets a nice tone, there is no cohesion with the tracks that follow. “Goodbye Town” is mediocre, especially considering that the latter end of the album offers a similar track, titled “Long Teenage Goodbye,” which is remarkably better; I can’t help but wonder how two songs about the nostalgia of a young romance with the word “goodbye” in the title made the cut on the same album.

This point alone begs the question: has Lady Antebellum lost their heat? Is the energy dissipating?

Most of the songs feel like wastes of space, which is upsetting as there are only 12 rather short tracks on the album. “Nothing like the First Time” and “Better Off Now” are uninteresting. “All for Love” is decent for summer, and “Better Man” is full of romantic gesture, but anticlimactic all the same.

Past the chunkiness, however, there are some gems worth salvaging for your playlists. “Downtown” has the bite of their whiskey tone, but none of the sadness (refreshingly). The hook is playful — “I don’t know why you don’t take me downtown / like you got anywhere better to be / talk it up and give me the go round round like a good time tease” — and should definitely be on your summer mixtapes.

“It Ain’t Pretty” sounds signature — “I just bought a drink / It ain’t pretty when a heart breaks” — and worth getting stuck in your head. “Golden,” the title track, shows off Lady Antebellum’s skills, invisible on most of the other tracks; instead of feeling thrown together in a rush, the song is complete, thoughtful, and has a nice blend of both melancholy and sweetness.

The best advice I can offer is to wait for The Civil Wars to put out their next album to get your fix of country break-up songs, because “Golden” will leave you disappointed.

By Aysia Matz