Album Review: Jason Aldean ‘Night Train’

As country singers go, Jason Aldean has a voice and a style that absolutely drip of stereotypes, laid on so thick as to seem like a caricature, but he’s so insanely good at it that nobody seems to mind that he might be playing it up a little. Maybe a lot.

Night Train is his fifth album, and another that tries to hit every single base and check every last box on the country to-do list. He’s got more than a few songs about his misadventures with womenfolk, odes to the good ol’ days, ballads to his pickup truck and refrains on a crumbling economy. He even serenades a water tower. If you only buy one country record this year you probably won’t miss much if you make it this one.

‘The Only Way I Know’ is about being a country badass, with country badass friends Luke Bryan and Eric Church along to lend him some support, or at least lend the impression that they three might be able to kick a cow right the hell over. It’s an anthemic and good enough song to be a favorite of young men in many a small town, and the album has enough of this going on to make that the target demographic.

‘Take a Little Ride’ wants to be of the same basic design, but it seems to describe one of the most mundane days in Jason’s life. It’s musically presented and set up like an epic night of freedom in his Chevy, but I don’t know that it is completely successful. He describes washing his truck and stopping at a convenience store to buy some beer on his way to a friend’s house, like the country version of Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’.

An interesting and elucidating aside about ‘Take a Little Ride’: The brand of beer Jason purchased that glorious afternoon has been changed since the song originally debuted on the radio, to reflect an endorsement deal with Coors. I’m not sure how offended to be or whether that really matters, but it does seem like a tune of this design– that is very self-focused and about nothing if not the experience of being Jason Aldean– should reflect the truth, not simply who pays him the most to pretend that’s what he did on Tuesday. Country music is perhaps second only to rap in the requirement for artists to be real and relatable.

He does come across as genuine in other places, and in particular when he sings of the woman or women in his life. He can seem absolutely self-deprecating on these songs, which is the second most common theme on Night Train. On ‘Walking Away’ he sings of beautiful women and the fact that they should run away from him like a monster, and ‘When She Says Baby’ paints the picture of a woman’s ability to stop his apparent drunken rampages by offering up her body to calm him. It’s not a particularly flattering set of images, but that’s probably why it comes across as heartfelt.

The only moment on this album that breaks away from a blueprint on how to build a country song is ‘1994’, which is slightly weird but also kind of fun. Jason and I agree that 1994 was one of the best years for music in recent-ish memory, but I can’t say for certain that I have any idea what he was listening to. I scarcely understand a reference in this song, but I think he’s trying his hand at a hiphop motif.

My own favorite track is ‘Wheels Rollin’, because it seems to sum up everything Jason Aldean and his music are about. It’s a song about being out on the road, traveling the country and performing music in different towns. While there are countless songs about the very same thing out there I think just about every one of them should be considered among the most important in the catalogs of their creators. The lyrics are very positive, as Jason sings about his love for performing, how comfortable he is on stage, how much he feeds off of it, but the music actually feels quite foreboding and dark. I like that, too.

If you’re interested in a very paint-by-numbers approach to country music, Night Train was designed from the ground up to be your favorite album of the year. It’s got a little bit of everything, and while it is probably not the most natural or organic album of its type it has a few moments that save it from being completely puerile.

Release Date: October 16, 2012
Image Courtesy of Broken Bow Records