The Years Go Fast

The Years Go Fast

The Cadillac Three continues to be one of country music’s more compelling acts on the band’s sixth album, the follow-up to 2020’s down-home and funky Tabasco & Sweet Tea. During the intervening years, the collective grief wrought by the pandemic, as well as the loss of lead singer Jaren Johnston’s father, put the trio through the wringer—transformative experiences made evident within the more serious, often vulnerable lyrics on this LP. Sonically, Johnston and bandmates Neil Mason and Kelby Ray settle into an expansive groove, bringing together the roughshod Southern rock of their early albums with the more experimental country-funk fusion of recent efforts. Opener “Young & Hungry” finds Johnston at his most swaggering, his gritty vocal landing somewhere between those of Kings of Leon’s Caleb Followill and The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn. Songs like “Double Wide Grave” and “Comin’ Down From You” showcase the trio’s rougher edges, with driving beats and a freewheeling energy that verges on punk. Johnston also puts his hitmaker hat on—he has multiple No. 1 singles as a songwriter for other artists, after all—for tunes like “Love Like War,” a melodic rock ballad built atop a wall of fuzzy guitar, and closer “Pistols on the Levee,” a gently rollicking anthem about keeping the faith when the going gets tough.

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