Chase Rice has fast become a UK fan favourite, delivering a staunch performance at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, where he wowed audiences with his energetic performance. Now, he reveals greater nuances in his songwriting and story-telling in The Album Part II out tomorrow. Here we review the record and reveal our standout moments.
It was only a few months ago that fans and critics were delighted by Chase Rice’s The Album Part I, now Rice is back with the second instalment of the record and it’s yet more epic than the last.
The modest opening piano melody homes in on a flashback to a simpler time on ‘You’. The backing track here is stunning, capturing a raw intimate sound on the piano that sounds like you are listening to the track from inside the piano itself. The feathery, fragile vocals are panned in a way that immerse listeners into the story and the reinvented pop and blues ballad is covered in splashes of vibrant and acrobatic percussion. Rice’s lyricism is taken up a notch, where he paints the story of the song in bright multitudes, in correlation with the well balanced relationship of synths and natural instruments that support the curveball love story sung between Rice and his female duet partner.
Rice revisits a more traditional country sound during the opening of his next track entitled ‘Break. Up. Drunk’. As he sings ‘Let’s split a fare for Tennessee and drink until it’s dry/ make love to the radio and kiss it all goodbye’, the rhythm of the song is tighter than a railway track – the energy of the track moving full speed ahead. Rice’s vocals cut through the track’s layers of instrumentation – fusing together a folkier sound (full of banjos and double time twanging) with components of a gleeful summer smash.
On ‘Down Home Runs,’ the Northern California artist raises a proud flag for his hometown. While lyrically the song rekindles the fond memories of his small town, sonically Rice carves a new path aside from his fellow Northern California singers – Charlie Daniels, Randy Travis, or evening fellow Asheville native Luke Combs. Instead, the track has a more explosive quality than a bluegrass touch, which drives the emotion of the song to the edge.
‘Belong’ is probably one of the most sentimental tracks of Rice’s career. Known for having bro-country stitched in the neck of each of his albums, Rice closes the album with a song that shows that he is able to stray from the party scene to tell stories of ‘An entire generation raised in a phone/ But hey this thing takes notes and those notes make me able to remember melodies that put food on the table.’ Out of all of the four new tracks on the album it is the most humble instrumentally, which in turn makes Rice’s voice stand out from the mix.
Part II of The Album enables Rice to continue to develop his songwriting, delving into deeper songwriting and more creative production. They retain their ‘Chase Rice’ hallmarks that make for a huge live performance, but imbibe them with a newly sentimental streak that lays out a new path for Rice.
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Standout Tracks:Â Belong / Break. Up. Drunk.
