Child’s Play

By Michael Saba

Brad Paisley shouldn’t have anything to prove with a bevy of platinum albums, a Grammy and Grand Ole Opry bona fides under his belt. He must be feeling restless with success, because Play dilutes the pop-country chops and cultural asides that unify his previous albums in favor of instrumental facsimiles of Dwight Yoakam and Waylon Jennings. Paisley’s funnyman self-deprecation is conspicuously absent, leaving a lifeless exercise in genre-hopping that often plagues “experimental” albums. It’s too much material to cover cohesively. The cringe-inducing “Cliffs of Rock City” shoehorns guitar, banjo and strings into the blandest heavy metal this side of Stryper. The duet with B.B. King on “Let the Good Times Roll” is blues by the numbers. At nearly an hour long, the album is a tangled braid of unworkable ideas from an artist who should stick to his forte: songs about the Internet.