As he swims through his self-loathing over growling guitar riffs that rise to crash like waves on “I Deserve A Heartbreak,” Zach John King is applying macho tendencies to a newly found soft side. When the band halts to pause, isolating King’s wry chorus before he’s dropped in the ocean a few bars later, you can sense that his motifs are astute even when jarring. It’s a post-bro build in a pro-authenticity climate. It gets hard to toe the line between earnestness mistaken for cheesiness and being blunt to the degree that it’s polarizing. King is a sensitive soul trapped in a brash body, like many of his contemporaries, whose presentation can conflict with their product.
On his biggest project to date, he gains a few character-toughening scratches, and even more scrapes that never break skin. The six-track showcase here is a sanitized mish-mash of sounds and scopes that often agree, save for the occasional sonic and thematic clash. Even when there is a disconnect between pen and production, it’s hard to point the finger in a single direction. All the hot tickets are even moving backward or laterally in cultural progression, especially in the genre cluster created by the internet. Forward now often sounds stuck. King does what most Gen-Z talent with a smorgasbord of bi-polar playlists to choose from end up falling back on, pulling a few recognizable moments from a wide-ranging palette. Well-versed yet rarely challenging, “Slow Down” is more of a shotgun spray than a sniper’s aim. It grazes a few surfaces but never really sinks into the bone with any of them.
But as soon as the gates open on “Lose You,” youthful fervor and foresight hone in on a few key, self-establishing moments for any budding bronco. The project’s opener is a warm, fuzzy feeling right out of the gate, our small-town Georgia native whistling through his hooks and choruses as fumes fill the air and his drinking buddies croak along in unison. It’s a night that’s been lived tenfold in these woods, cloaked in a stomp and suspenders, curiously peeking around the corner but never wandering from the comforts of the truck bed.
When we arrive at the halfway mark, things start getting hazy again. For instance, “She Didn’t Have To” is a love-drunk, morning-after heartthrob that gets a little jostled. Partly due to last night’s imbibement, no doubt, and wholly engulfed in the flutters in King’s stomach. The chorus is a mouthful, and his rattling off of reasons she should leave gets tacky. Though there aren’t any warts, despite how often they’re suggested. His rasp is irritatingly perfect, the backing band trying to roughen up a naturally soft instinct. You get the feeling like they’re painting dirt on their fingernails. Tell-all ballads like these shouldn’t be foreign for King or any of his citations, but they come across as forced when the subject is so verbose with their skeletons. The closet is the scariest when it’s silent.
Like most jacks of any trade south of the Mason-Dixon, this Georgia boy seems most comfortable when he takes his time. When he operates that way, he sounds more in tune with his surroundings, even if he has to beg for the brake pedal. In “Slow Down,” that mindset is verbalized so aptly that it takes a minute to register how classic its good ole boy sensibilities are. A similar song and dance, there’s never a sense that we’re hitting the gas so hard that the passenger window becomes a blur. Every point of reference, from witty writing to angst-fueled delivery, gets its “I spy” moment.
In six tracks, there is a staggering amount of progression. Where we started with a punch-drunk, cautiously curious kid, we somehow end with a guy confident in his most comfortable modes. There’s the stagnant, almost routine, barebones of a blueprint that gets spruced up with lyrics so cliché they morph into cleverness on “Hole In The Wall.” Knowing where this one is headed takes far less than three guesses. As King soars to the line “You can find me where I hope you won’t find me,” charm and candor start to meet. As sterile as Slow Down gets in its lowlights, there are a few shining moments for King as an artist, open to the classic hillbilly wit and the industry’s new genre-mixing palette.
