Boiled chicken can serve exactly two purposes in a person’s life: it can be sustenance during a major food shortage or on Doomsday, or it can be the perfect meal for your dog. It’s not supposed to taste good or make Gordon Ramsay shiver in his boots, but it does technically feed you.
On a similar note, if you’re addicted to music, stuck on a desert island, and one by one, Spotify deleted every album from your phone, Dustin Lynch’s Clean Slate would be enough to keep you going another day. You won’t like it, but it’ll fill the void in your life that’s left when no other music is available to listen to.
The seventh studio album from the “Cowboys & Angels” singer, Clean Slate tries to give Dustin a new launching point to continue marketing his tour, send more songs to country radio, and give people more reasons to listen to him sing. It’s not worried about standing out from the crowd or challenging the norm in any way; it almost sounds like it was intended for an audience absolutely starving for another generic country album, so Dustin did the bare minimum and kicked out 12 songs that mean nothing.
It’s been strange following Dustin Lynch’s career. From tender love-story guy to would-be EDM club master, he’s spanned nearly every subgenre of country music without standing out in any. He’s almost the equivalent of peaking in 8th grade: everyone assumes you’ll go on a serious looksmaxxing run in high school, but you become goth, an athlete, and a nerd in the span of three years to find yourself, and nothing works.
Lynch has found himself in a similarly self-void place. Clean Slate doesn’t erase his earlier ambitions in country music, nor does it highlight his best attributes as a lyricist or vocalist. Instead, it tries to do nothing offensive or daring at all – it just exists. It’s somehow more void than a recent Luke Bryan album.
Dustin sounds… off on this record. Not different or artistically challenging, just uninterested. Songs like “Lightning Don’t” and “Talkin’” go by in a flash, with a serious lack of charm or energy, while “One Tennessee” attempts to slow things down but comes off as pure murmuring in the background of a music festival. The Ashley Cooke-laced track “How You Been” can be found on this project, as well as “Easy to Love,” two of his least-impactful promotional singles he’s ever put out.
It’s a shame that none of these songs can live up to the highs that Dustin Lynch has flirted with before. We know he’s capable of recording a great love song or adding a sultry spin to a radio single with his low-ranging vocals, but you just don’t get any of it here. Not even the title track props him up in any significant way; sure, it attempts to sound different and fresh with a subtle choir in the background during the chorus, but the lyrics aren’t particularly interesting, and the rest of the album fails to deliver a consistent message.
If this is a true “clean slate” for Dustin, it’s time to find a better solution than the discounted Windex he’s seemingly using here. Nothing about this project feels fresh, new, or captivating. Instead, Dustin collected some songs and shipped them out.
Where the album falls completely apart is the outro. Not only is “Easy to Love” the last country-sounding track you hear, but the very last entry on the album is also injected with EDM, which is absolutely baffling. Sure, his label probably just wanted his popular club banger to be on his record, and tacking it onto the end of the album is the easiest way to do that. But it destroys any intentionality Clean Slate’s tracking had going for itself. It goes from sounding like a collection of songs to a playlist with an accidental addition at the end.
Dustin Lynch should stick with his first two albums. Go on the Angels & Cowboys Tour or something. His recent output isn’t working, and after all this time, it’s hard to predict when it will again.
