Seasons Change (Thirty Tigers, 2018)

"Boys from Back Home" is Scotty McCreery's amalgamation of Kenny Chesney's "I Go Back" and "Boys of Fall," which even borrows words from each hit song to create something attempting to be new. It's not new. Instead, it sounds more like songwriting by committee, relying upon radio listener demographics. Many of these songs were created to sound immediately familiar to mainstream ears. They will. This doesn't mean they're good, though, let alone meaningful. Seasons change, but the songs remain the same.

"Five More Minutes" represents McCreery's misguided attempt to play the Tim McGraw pull-at-the-heartstrings card. It, too, misses the mark. "In Between" is the sound of McCreery pandering to lifestyle indecisiveness. He's "somewhere in between" saint and sinner. We'll never confuse the baby-faced McCreery with a Jim Beam-swilling miscreant, though, no matter what the lyrics to his song argue to the contrary.

McCreery mostly sounds like a fine voice, with little to say. Singers like Josh Turner and Joe Nichols, two of the best voices we have today, are careful to (mostly) make good choices when it comes to the songs they record. McCreery sounds like he's primarily shooting for immediate radio airplay gratification when he really should be aiming to create an artistic legacy.

Kentucky Fried Chicken used to wish everybody seasoned greetings during the holidays. But the greeting McCreery wishes us with "Seasons Change" is simply bland and un-tasty.