The OWL
| Zac Brown Band
The OWL
The band released their sixth album The Owl on September 20, 2019. The album includes collaborations with Skrillex, Max Martin, Ryan Tedder, Benny Blanco, Andrew Watt, Jason "Poo Bear" Boyd, and others. A digital single from the album, "Leaving Love Behind" was released on July 26, 2019. Brown describes some songs on the album as "personal" and "pretty heavy."[31] Concurrently, Brown released a solo album called Controversy, accompanied by a new single called "Swayze. - WIKIPEDIA
Critic Reviews
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Variety
A busy, disjointed, manic, mutt of a mono-genre effort with absolutely no compass, direction, or general purpose, ‘The Owl’ is the vomiting out of any and all popular music influences mashed together like peanut butter and poodle shit.
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Daily Bruin
The Owl’ achieves country-pop fusion, stays true to roots.
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Six Shooter Country
Make a rap song if you want, make a country song, make a flipping industrial electro album if you must, just give it some heart, for crying out loud.
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Sounds Like Nashville
To steal an earlier ZBB album title, this record could’ve been named Jekyll + Hyde, due to the musical whiplash you’ll get when giving it a spin.
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Your Life in a Song
‘The Owl’ is an album I tried desperately hard to like. I’m rooting for the guys and know the phenomenal heights they’re capable of reaching; this just isn’t it.
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Saving Country Music.com
It’s not that the blending of genres should always be discouraged, or even that country music shouldn’t evolve to some degree over time. But as Zac Brown has just underscored and validated yet again with The Owl, there is a value in trying to define genre borders at least to some extent, and the detritus-filled slag pit that results in trying to combine country, EDM, and whatever else should be strongly discouraged.
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RMU Sentry Media
Overall, “The Owl” is the worst album that Zac Brown Band has released. It is possible to go so far as to say it is the worst “country” album that has ever been released.
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billboard
The Owl is more indicative of his wide-ranging musical interests.
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Penn State Commmedia
the songs are catchy and fans are sure to listen to whatever the band puts out. The cookie cutter lyrics and repetitive “pop” beats will not resonate in a few years when the band continues to put out music.
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Entertainment Focus
Sadly The Owl just isn’t a very good record.
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Michigan Daily
Every artist changes their sound. Whether it’s a switch in genre or producers, a musician’s urge to try something new is as natural as a fan’s initial discomfort in hearing their favorite band sound different. But I don’t feel uncomfortable listening to The Owl or even The Controversy despite how cringe-worthy both can be. I just feel sad. It’s tempting to write an obituary for the Zac Brown Band, but the situation is worse than that.
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ALL MUSIC
The fact that a good chunk of the numbers work does not erase how deeply strange this album is. A band who once celebrated the simple pleasures of toes in the sand are now singing about champagne glasses filled with diamonds and, no matter how many times The Owl is spun, it's impossible to tell how they got to this point.
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UML Connector
The songs do not feature their strengths, which are the band’s ability to play their instruments and their voice. Perhaps they will find a way to combine their ambition with their talent on the next album, but for now there is only this mess.
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Diary of a Music Addict
‘The Owl’ has none of the elements that make the Zac Brown Band so good. And it’s just not very good.
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Flyctory.com
The Owl just does not feel better. I don’t see a common story, a message or something else which catches me. The album is experimental and a departure from their route in an undefined direction.
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PATREON
yeah, it's bad. Really bad. Enjoy!
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TMD
While ‘The Owl’ isn’t quite as disastrous as surrounding discourse may imply, it still shows the Zac Brown Band members working well beneath their talent levels, resulting in anything but an authentic musical evolution.
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spectrum pulse
avoid this shit like the plague.
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Tinnitist
The hard-working country-rockers cut loose on their most eclectic outing to date.
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The Suffolk Journal
While it is healthy for artists to experiment with their sound and style, this album felt like it was extending itself too far to set itself apart from the rest.
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Country Perspective
The problem is not the band in Zac Brown Band, but Zac Brown himself. If you remove the three worst songs on this album, the remaining songs are overall pretty good. But the three worst songs are so bad that for many it just completely dominates the rest of The Owl.
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