Jason Aldean has, over the years, been quite happy to court controversy, not least with 2023’s Try That In A Small Town, which was buried deep in the setlist of last night’s performance at Spark Arena. Odd, then, that this was a quite unremarkably mundane country-rock show.
The show kicked off as it clearly intended with a handful of straight-ahead country rockers, opener Hicktown rather more aggressively rocky than one might typically expect from a show like this, and for this Aldean owes a debt of gratitude to his touring band, including drummer Rich Redmond and lead guitarist Kurt Allison, who sounded like they might be more at home in a classic heavy-metal band. But as the concert progressed, and Aldean strapped on the obligatory acoustic guitar, the music devolved into straight-ahead run-of-the-mill country chuggers that started to blend into each other.
There were occasional standouts—Crazy Town, in particular, exhibited considerable potential with its chopped guitar intro that threatened to grow into an outtake from a late-period ZZ Top rehearsal session before blanding out into standard country, while Tattoos On This Town showed a hint of interest in its wah-wah guitar intro before, again, settling back into bread-and-butter country.
And this, then, was the problem with much of last night’s show. Aldean is, ultimately, a rather average country singer with a talented band and a competent team of songwriters, a few of whom were also on stage with him last night. For the first handful of songs, his voice was so far down in the mix that he sounded like his own backing vocalist. This, to be fair, wasn’t entirely a bad thing—when the sound crew did give him a boost, his vocals were, well, adequate.
Aldean himself is, ultimately, little more than an assemblage of country-rock clichés, a chunky middle-aged good old boy with a round face and a slightly rubbish thin beard, dressed in a cowboy hat, diesel-engine-endorsing shirt and jeans slit up the seam, the better to accommodate his cowboy boots. And, sadly, his music, in particular his singing, is this image set to vinyl.
And while this plays exceptionally well to the American flyover states of another of his mid-set numbers, it didn’t go over quite as well in Auckland as I suspect he might have wished. The audience in a mostly—let’s be generous and say around 80%—full Spark Arena were politely interested for much of the show. It wasn’t until about half an hour into the show before Big Green Tractor, a song almost laboratory-grown to play well in New Zealand, got the whole of the audience singing along. But as soon as Tractor was over, the majority of the fans on the floor took their seats, the folk around me carried on talking, and people started leaving. The woman wearing a t-shirt that looked like she’d just bought it at the merch tent on her way in left round around this point, and didn’t come back, as did the bloke in the cowboy hat sitting in front of me. I’ll assume that the queues for the loos were simply very, very long.
There was a good show hiding somewhere in last night’s concert. Aldean’s band are a tight unit, and some of the best moments of the show came when guitarists Allison and Jack Sizemore were allowed to play some decently tasty country-inflected rock, and drummer Redmond pounded his kit with more commitment than is customary in a country show. But Aldean simply hasn’t the voice, or the charisma, to cash the cheques his band are writing for him. A handful of attempts to engage with the audience were a nice effort, but asking “Do you guys get Instagram down here?” perhaps should come after you’ve built up just a tad bit more of a rapport with an audience who could not, by any stretch, be said to be completely onside.
As has been mentioned, Aldean has courted controversy, most notably with Try That In A Small Town, a song without which he would likely not have made quite as big a name for himself as he now has. He claimed, as he teed the song up, that it’s about “taking care of each other.” Jason Aldean, then, clearly does not read, or at the very least, does not understand, the lyrics of the songs that are written for him. That is is quite demonstrably not what this song is about. And while he’s right to claim that Kiwis do indeed “take care of each other,” we do so in a way that’s very different from the rather ugly way that this song depicts, a world it tries to romanticise that is the antithesis of the bicultural and multicultural country that Aotearoa at the very least tries to be.
So last night’s show was—let’s be generous—fine. It was ultimately simply fine, and outside of the couple of small knots of keen fans who crowded the barriers in front of the stage, I’m not entirely sure you’d have found too many terribly vocal supporters of Aldean at Spark Arena last night. Not once he’d finished singing about tractors, anyway.
