Country 2 Country review – beery bro-country and boyband vibes

Midway through her set, Nashville legend Lee Ann Womack declares: “I make hardcore country music.” It’s a curious statement to make at the third Country 2 Country festival, the annual UK showcase of Nashville’s biggest stars. But tonight’s lineup illustrates the schism between new and traditional country that has developed over the past decade. Womack, with her bleak, beautiful songs that circle around themes of alcoholism, religion and self-loathing, has positioned herself firmly on the traditionalist side of the divide.
Womack is a magnetic presence who has a pealing, sad voice and the fervour of a street preacher. She effortlessly switches from the quotidian to the mystic; indeed, real-life circumstances – “solitary thinkin’ and lonesome drinkin’”, as she puts it – seem to necessitate her encounters with the devil and God. Womack’s seventh and most recent album, The Way I’m Livin’, is one of her strongest, as illustrated live by the flashing intensity of its title track. Dipping in to her back catalogue, she strikes a particularly powerful note on Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago, deftly picking apart the effect of the beauty myth – “Maybelline can’t hide the lines of time that’s gone” – as her own blond ringlets shake under the stage lights.
Brandy Clark, the night’s opener, is a longtime Nashville songwriter whose 2014 debut, 12 Stories, earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist. Clark employs a more journalistic perspective than the heart-on-sleeve Womack. If she cuts a diffident figure, it’s simply in service of lyrical brilliance. Her characters are ordinary people: the jaded mother who needs weed to cope with life on Get High; the town addicted to prescription pills on Take a Pill; the woman tempted by adultery on What’ll Keep Me Out of Heaven. Here she delivers their stories with dry humour and raw emotion. The feminist solidarity of Crazy Women is a vital angle to voice; and Clark performs three new songs – including the defiant, bluesy Broke – which suggest promising things to come on her second album.
Tonight’s lineup is, essentially, two shows. Female country artists like Clark and Womack may garner critical plaudits, but male stars seem to find popularity both on US airwaves and, judging from the audience reaction, among British country fans.

A frattier Bryan Adams … Luke Bryan at Country 2 Country festival. Photograph: Joseph Okpako/Redferns

“Bro-country”, epitomised here by tank-topped duo Florida Georgia Line, is divisive – and it’s easy to see why. It is disconnected from the roots of the genre: subtlety and skill is replaced by deliberately obnoxious, beery chauvinism and alpha-male rock posturing. Here no trick is too obvious, no lyric too basic: almost every one of their chest-bumping, fist-pumping frat-party anthems seems to refer to a Friday or Saturday night, while Sippin’ on Fire, for instance, rhymes “fire” with not only “desire” but “lighters”. It might be easier to take if the sneering voice of Tyler Hubbard and the barrage of guitar didn’t recall Nickelback quite so much, and if the horndog leering on songs such as Sun Daze wasn’t quite so gross: “I’ll sit you up on the kitchen sink / And stick the pink umbrella in your drink”. It’s the kind of thing that would drive the characters in Womack’s songs back to the bottle.
Headliner Luke Bryan also falls under the bro-country umbrella, but cuts a far more genial figure. He’s known to deliver a boyband-worthy melody, and songs such as Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and I Don’t Want This Night to End are driven by relentless hooks and starry-eyed romanticism. Uncomplicated stuff after Clark and Womack, but this slightly frattier Bryan Adams seems harmless rather than gormless after Florida Georgia Line. Bryan’s richly nasal voice is an acquired taste, but the only time he drags is during a brief solo-piano interlude, when he wallows in the shallows of an inarticulate macho sentiment.