Still Feels Good review

Rascal Flatts: loved by everyone

This celebrited country-pop band that released last year the best-selling album Me And My Gang and got the Grammy for the Best Country Song, was formed in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2000. The trio includes the leading vocalist Gary LeVox and two multi-instrumentalists Jay DeMarcus and Joe Don Rooney. Actually, they were at first positioned as a teenage attraction - and teenages are really crazy about Rascal Flatts, in order to understand it one has to visit a trio's concert. But adults also proved to consider the band's hits extremely addictive. Besides, the band became the favourite not of the country waves exclusively, but they were cordially greeted on the mainstream radiostations. Their three studio albums had shamelessly good sales, while the fourth disc became one of the biggest hits of 2006. No wonder, Rascal Flatts are so much loved by the public: their high-qualitative country-pop with flawless harmonies and piercing lyrics in the play of cute guys can charm everyone.

Still Feels Good: perfect as usual

This album has the same conception of success as the previous work: the artists make a little harder accent on good adult pop rather then on country, chose only the best material and made experiments in order not to stay at one place. So is Bob That Head, a country song for sure, though it has a peculiar rock and rap mixture. In this track Gary LeVox tells about the joys of Friday night, when the working week is over and one can relax to the full roll. Winner At A Losing Game has a stylish flavour of '70s country rock, while Secret Smile is a sweet, but not sickly-sweet pulsating pop tune, so is without any doubt Take Me There. Rascal Flatts are famous for their ballads with remembable refrains, and Still Feels Good can boast of two such strong dramatic compositions at least - Make Me Remember and Better Now. The first mentioned ballad is a bitter remeniscence of better days in relations, and Better Now is a sorrowful retrospect of past mistakes.

Faithful to their style, open for new horizons

Still Feels Good is an album different in some aspects from the previous works of Rascal Flatts. First of all, the band does not have as many story songs on this edition as they had on the other discs. The only such narrative classical country work on the album is the socially oriented closer It's Not Supposed To Go Like That. Secondly, on Me And My Gang the musicians had only finished their way to the logically predictable country-pop with the bigger part of serious adult pop-music. Still Feels Good, fulfilled in the recenlty found personal style, shows that the guys know how to open new views in their music, but at the same time stay recognizable and faithful to themselves. This disc is indicating of Rascal Flatts members being very professional and serious of their work, they collaborated with talented producers and musicians, wrote a decent part of the material themselves. What is of huge importance, the artists realise the difference between common and perfect in music - and they chose only the perfect for Still Feels Good.