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Jake Owen - Easy Does It
| Billboard |
| I don't want to be a guy with a song on the radio that no one knows," Jake Owen recently told Billboard. With the release of his sophomore set, he is well on his way to achieving his goal. The album is a refreshing mix of thoughtfulness ("Nothin' Grows in Shadows") and testosterone ("Eight Second Ride" and "Who Said Whiskey [Was Meant to Drink a Woman Away]"). The first single, "Don't Think I Can't Love You," is a soulful story of loving when love is all you have. On songs like "Easy Does It," Owen gives a nod to hero Conway Twitty, who told women what they wanted to hear and then gave it to them. The most interesting offering is "Green Bananas," a tale about never knowing when one's life may end ("I don't buy green bananas, 'cause I don't plan that far ahead"). —Ken Tucker...full text |
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| Ew |
| Jake Owen kicks off his sophomore effort in rakish lonely-rambler style with the dark, driving ''Tell Me,'' and there's believable passion behind his drawl on single ''Don't Think I Can't Love You.'' But the rest of Easy Does It suffers from curiously opposing problems: too many songs in awe of generically wild women — including ''Eight Second Ride,'' repeated from his 2006 debut — and a tendency for the 27-year-old to slip into middle-aged schmaltz. Fingers crossed he'll be around to revisit the more maudlin stuff in about two decades....full text |
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| Nytimes |
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Somalia” and “America” arrive side by side, as adjacent tracks, on “Troubadour,” the sophomore album by the wiry rapper K’naan. And that sequencing feels pointed and insistent, like the songs themselves. “So what you know about the pirates terrorize the ocean?” he asks in “Somalia,” over the stirrings of a children’s choir. In “America” he follows up a Somali incantation with a boastful disclaimer: “Not long ago I don’t spoke English.” K’naan, born Kanaan Warsame, left Somalia with his mother in 1991, fleeing the brutality of civil war. Finding refuge first in New York and then in Toronto, where he still lives, he devised a musical persona indebted both to alternative hip-hop and to the legacies of Fela Kuti and Bob Marley. Parts of “Troubadour” were recorded at Marley’s Tuff Gong studios in Jamaica at the invitation of Damian Marley, who takes an effective guest turn on “I Come Prepared,” the album’s liveliest track....full text |
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