Little Big Town Are Country Music’s Wiliest Stars
There are days you can convince yourself that Tango in the Night is
Fleetwood Mac’s best album. Sure, Rumours is way bigger, and Tusk way cooler. But there’s something about transplanting all that Southern Californian decadence, that incestuous personal intrigue, that gilded folk-pop sumptuousness to the Reagan era — 1987, to be exact. The age of lush synthesizers, percolating drum machines, Cinemaximal spandex prurience, giant shoulder pads, and elegant aerosol splendor. (Also: cocaine. Even more cocaine.) Get a load of this tropical-fever-dream album cover. Get a load of “Big Love,” and “Seven Wonders,” and “Little Lies.” In late March, you can buy a triple-disc Tango in the Night reissue for $75 and cloak yourself in all that gauzy DayGlo-sunset radiance anew. Or you could just listen to Little Big Town now.
Little Big Town are a coed country quartet — one married couple, one lady with majestic and leonine hair, and one other guy — who’ve inspired Fleetwood Mac comparisons for years, and somehow lived up to them. (They even did a genuinely incendiary cover of “The Chain” back in 2013 at the CMT Music Awards, with bonus righteous Keith Urban shredding and awkward Taylor Swift headbanging.) They specialize in exquisite four-part harmonies and luxurious soft-rock cheese, but, like, fancy cheese. Brie, or whatever the Southern equivalent of brie is. They’re great and just a little volatile, inclined to go their own way while still somehow giving you exactly what you want. Their new album, The Breaker, came out Friday; it might not be their best, but it’s their fullest, their most opulent and humid, their most flagrantly Reaganomical.
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