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Zach Bryan Hits His Limit
On The Great American Bar Scene, the accidental superstar’s formula remains potent but predictable.
His prolificacy and gift for songwriting — which cuts through the bluster you might expect from a flaxen-haired, clean-shaven professional handler of explosives — would award him star status without having to navigate the protracted courtship of venues, label execs, and producers it tends to take to make a household name out of a sentimental acoustic-guitar darling. His production, approaches to genre, and line deliveries are no longer surprising yet no less potent.A machinelike efficacy suggests Zach Bryan could stick with this balance forever, gesturing to a few different singer-songwriter traditions while carefully avoiding abject schmaltz, blessing Barstool bros with beautiful odes to love and grief while maintaining a twisting, unpredictable, purportedly apolitical public persona. “Mechanical Bull” speaks to the ineffable feeling that culture is growing digitized and unfeeling, turning a reflection on coin-operated bar rides into a rejoinder to the sentiment Jason Isbell floated through Jackson Maine in A Star Is Born ’s “Maybe It’s Time.” Where his elder posited putting the past to rest and moving on, Bryan’s “Bull” suggests keeping history alive in our memories: “Are the old ways dead or livin’ in my head?” Chasing the glory of Springsteen’s Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. across “Oak Island,” “American Nights,” and the title track — the latter of which actually name-checks the Boss — Bryan casts himself as a descendant to the New Jersey icon’s aching tales of broken American dreams in the same way the early E Street Band albums drew unsubtle Bob Dylan comparisons.
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