Country Troubadour Randy Houser Picks Up Some Serious Steam With Magnolia
If you’re a fan of acts like Trace Adkins, Luke Bryan & Dustin Lynch, chances are you’ve got a soft-spot for the late-noughties wave of Country Pop that helped bring Country as a whole into the limelight as a genre to be beloved rather than ridiculed, gaining a boost in popularity thanks to its crossover nature with the Indie Folk scene that started getting big around that time. This era of Country Pop maintained much of the wholesome storytelling & fully-analog instrumentation of their more traditional counterparts, feeling grounded in the roots of the genre’s more laidback history, but groups like Florida Georgia Line changed all of this when they transitioned the industry towards a much more Pop-ified sound – On Magnolia, Randy Houser seems intent on bringing much of this light back to the scene, producing somewhat of a mixture of both worlds with likewise mixed results, though the effectiveness of such a malleable sound may be lost on modern audiences.