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Post Malone’s Country Album Has Too Much Baggage
F-1 Trillion burrows so far into the mainstream Nashville machine it inherits its problems.
The grit implied in Post Malone’s rearview clashes with neat, sunny sounds and resolutions such that you wonder why writers like Jason Isbell, who sings from experience about logging the distance between past and present selves, or Sturgill Simpson, whose career is a miraculous rebound from a military trajectory that didn’t pan out, weren’t brought to the roomy table of assisting personnel. But the starting lineup of Tim McGraw, Hank Williams Jr., Morgan Wallen, and Blake Shelton collabs — steely rock stompers that set a pace only broken by ballads that manage to feel just as busy as the louder songs — sticks the album with a sluggish momentum and sameness of sound that it struggles to break. But it’s hard not to think of Cowboy Carter, the fearlessly imperfect pivot Post appeared on this year, where an R&B-pop shape-shifter splashed through several varied and colorful permutations of country music in roughly the same amount of time Trillion spends painting everything Solo-cup red.
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