Blake Shelton's tenth studio album is his first since divorcing country music queen Miranda Lambert and subsequently taking up with his fellow coach from The Voice, Gwen Stefani, who duets here on the simmering "Go Ahead and Break My Heart." It can be tempting to hear Shelton's new breakup songs – the bitterly comic "She's Got a Way with Words," the coolly regretful "Bet You Still Think About Me" – as targeted toward Lambert, or to imagine Stefani as the someone new he flirts with tipsily on the first single, "Came Here to Forget." Shelton's warmly confident delivery makes those romantic twists and turns sound both lived in but universal, and the reverent finale, "Savior's Shadow," suggests that the good ol' boy's maturing into a man. Still, rowdy party-starters like "Straight Outta Cold Beer" (its title riffing off the N.W.A. classic) and the self-explanatory "Doin' It to Country Songs" (with help from the Oak Ridge Boys) are there to prove that he's got a little more hell to raise before he goes to heaven.
Wavelength
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