After making his name with a few on-trend nods to a four-packs-and-trucks bro-country style, Georgia-born songwriter Kip Moore did a tidy job of working in stadium-leaning, widescreen eighties pop-rock on 2017’s Slowheart.
But while he’s claiming that this follow-up is a more personal affair with “a lot of weight on these songs”, his tendency to fall back on tired old lyrical tropes isn’t hugely convincing.
The title track features what “Mama told me” and it seems that his mom was a keen believer in gnomic platitudes (“It’s a wild world… find yourself a good girl. Life is short, some days are long.” Thanks, mum!).
Nonetheless, arena-friendly Bon Jovi-ish rockers such as She’s Mine and South have an easy, singalong appeal, and if Fire And Flame bears a passing resemblance to U2’s Still Haven’t Found What I’m Lookin’ For, replete with echo-laden guitar arpeggios, then that’ll surely do it no harm at all.
Wild? Not exactly, but there can’t be many places in the world where it wouldn’t translate.
