“Crazy Angels” feels like a perfect summer song. It’s fresh and we call it the roller-skating song. You hear the title and you think of some super-country, wanted by the law feel.
We have the love trifecta: “Faster,” “Wanted Woman” and “Pink Champagne.” On “Wanted Woman,” Josh Miller had the title, and I thought the line “you make me feel like a wanted woman” was a cool way to see the title. You don’t do a lot of love songs, but there are a few on this album. But we wanted to have music that was fun and felt good. It’s not solidly throwback, but we have a couple of songs that are a little more ’70s feel and some that are in the ’80s pop world and some ’90s rock stuff, and obviously country. With some other albums, it took me writing for a while before I figured out where the album’s gonna go. Obviously, we have photo that people can take photos in, because it’s all about the ‘Gram, right?” “We have denim backdrops and they can buy merch and bling out their cups. “There’s so many fans in town and we wanted to meet them where they are,” Underwood told Billboard during an interview at The Bell Tower prior to the exhibit’s opening. The exhibit, which runs Friday and Saturday at The Historic Bell Tower in Nashville, also features displays of some of Underwood’s dresses from her recent awards show performances, as well as a retail boutique. Underwood and her team took advantage of the timing - and the upbeat, dance-worthy vibes throughout the album - by launching The Denim & Rhinestones Experience, a pop-up exhibit that is open to the public, and features photo backdrops that tie in with songs from the album, including “Ghost Story” (a floral swing), “Pink Champagne” (a pink-hued “bubble” ball pit) and “Crazy Angels” (feathered angel wings). Underwood will perform during CMA Fest on Saturday at Nissan Stadium. The release of Denim & Rhinestones coincides with this year’s CMA Fest, which marks its return to the heart of downtown Nashville after a two-year, pandemic-induced hiatus. Malkmus may still stand on the outside smirking, poaching different elements of the underground and mainstream, assembling them in a fashion that's undeniably unique, but the craft and cleverness of Sparkle Hard can't disguise the simple fact that he means this music, man.Nick Jonas Says Priyanka Chopra Has Been His 'Rock' in Parenthood: 'I'm Grateful to Have a Teammate…
His youthful sneer has mellowed so much that he now sounds sincere, which helps cast his willful weirdness in a different light. Such flair suggests that Malkmus designed Sparkle Hard as a way to flex his musical muscles, but for as alluring as the album's sound is - and the record lives up to its title, glistening brightly with its panoramic guitars and coiled rhythms - it remains compelling upon repeated plays because, beneath the shimmering surface, this is not only one of his best collections of songs, but a record that acts like a casual summation of his enduring obsessions. The diversity dazzles, particularly as it's filled with elegant new accents to make familiar settings seem fresh, even when they're firmly within Malkmus' laconic wheelhouse witness his pitch-shifted vocals on "Rattler," which give the song's robotic rhythms a woozy sway, or how the pastoral beginnings of "Kite" get blown out with psychedelic wah-wahs and rushed rhythms. Upon the first spin, Sparkle Hard seems to veer all over the place, bouncing from the finely etched pop of "Future Suite" to the Teutonic jam of "Bike Lane," eventually winding up on the country-rock ramble of "Refute," a duet with Kim Gordon, who has never before been heard with anything resembling a twang (and likely never will again). Sparkle Hard comes into focus slowly and stately, coalescing around crawling piano chords that soon get blown to bits by guitars - thereby offering a neat encapsulation of how this, the seventh album Stephen Malkmus has made since disbanding Pavement in 1999, walks a fine line between the familiar and the unexpected.
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