Album Review: Wild Ones by Kip Moore

For better or for worse, ever since his 2012 debut, Georgian singer-songwriter Kip Moore has most often been referred to as an innovator of the “bro” subgenre that has been taking country airwaves by storm for some time now. For better or for worse, 2015’s Wild Ones mostly feels like a continuation of Moore’s work from that perception, with anthems and ballads alike expanding upon themes centered around partying, girls, pistols, sex, beer, and trucks. Where Moore breaks from his the traditional mold that he had enveloped himself around during the elongated Up All Night era (Moore had trashed an entire album’s worth of material and redone it to get where he is now with his sophomore effort) all lies within the composition.

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Kip Moore scored three big bro country hits in the two years surrounding 2012 –- "Somethin' 'Bout a Truck" was the 2011 breakthrough, followed by "Beer Money" in 2012 and "Hey Pretty Girl" in 2013 -- but he struggled on the journey to his second album, delivering two singles that, in his words, "stiffed," leading him to scrap an entire LP and write a new record, presumably one that's more commercial. Wild Ones, delivered three years after Up All Night, is that official second record and, as the neon-speckled album cover indicates, it's an album indebted to the '80s and not the hybrid of Hall & Oates and Paul Young suggested by the art, either. Moore plays up his middle-America bona fides, eager to conjure some of the spirit of fellow Springsteen fan Eric Church, but where Church prefers beefy guitars, Moore favors open-road anthems, songs that feel masculine but retain a vulnerable core.

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