The Mix Review | March 2012

Although this band’s country pop sound has scarcely tickled the UK singles listings, their last two records have both topped album charts in the US and Canada, with their latest offering making the UK top five. For me, the star attraction of this second single, from a production perspective, is the vocal editing, which is an exercise in firm but musical control. The pitching and timing are clearly superhuman, especially when you consider the vice-like hold that Charles Kelley’s voice exerts over his bandmates’ backing harmonies, but whatever behind-the-scenes work this may have involved is worn so lightly that suspension of disbelief is almost effortless, and you can pretty much just get on with enjoying the song. In particular, there’s a fine line between fixing subjective sourness in the tuning department, and removing the very pitch variations that make a performance live and breathe. This record treads that line with assurance. Take the second verse, for instance, where the addition of backing harmonies would tend to highlight even slight tuning discrepancies, but the ends of all the lead vocal lines (“beauty”, “kind”, “about her”, and “stand still”) nonetheless benefit tremendously from the kind of expressive pitch-domain vagueness that lesser productions frequently iron out through over-zealous application of Auto-Tune.