Buy Now
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
Jun 10, 2016A record slicker and straighter than its predecessors. Call it maturation as much as a shift in aesthetics.
-
Jun 10, 2016What lifts Black past merely being a good concept album is an old-school musicality that never takes a backseat to modern-country conventionality.
-
Jun 10, 2016No one can say Black isn’t ambitious, and it’s nuanced too; easily Bentley’s most personal, affecting release yet.
-
Aug 2, 2016Black feels like the embodiment of the masculine midlife crisis, with a similar lack of self-awareness on the part of the protagonist, even when he’s expressing realizations and moments of self-discovery.
-
Jun 10, 2016Echoey wall-of-sound sheen, soft-rock flourishes, guitar bombast, and omnipresent programming predominate. Presumably the intention was to create a sonic mood to match the album’s thematic concerns, but too often the execution leaves the songs sounding plodding and inert.