Album Review: Dean Brody, Boys

Canuck country star Dean Brody’s Boys is one of those albums that divides the pop culture landscape into halves goal-posted by albums that came before it and albums that came after. Brody’s eighth is a game-changer and epic in every way: catchy, beautifully written, produced, and performed and yet as approachable as blue jeans. 

Four of the album’s eight songs are pretty much instant classics—destined for perennial future play at weddings, parties, and christenings—which represents rather good ROI for the listener. Though something of a sonic red herring among predominantly tender songs, hootenanny “Can’t Help Myself” with guests The Reklaws is the kind of blistering, beer-soaked paean to lunacy the Farrelly brothers used to make entire movies about. 

It brings things down a notch, but “Canadian Summer” continues the fun, cheerfully fêting the blink-and-you-miss-it bliss of July afternoons by the lake in language lifted straight from our people. The only bummer is the seven-month wait to roll down the windows and blast the thing through the speakers. 

Yet it is emotional terrain, which Brody explores fearlessly here, that rockets Boys into the cosmos. “I’d Go to Jail” celebrates a daughter with such naked gratitude and vulnerability that listening almost feels like spying through drawn curtains. Similarly, the hushed ballad “Stay Up,” chronicling a gleaming late-night moment shared by a guy and the gal he still loves is just plain lovely, propelled by vivid and truly scene-setting lyrics. 

The title track—a show-stopping duet with rising star Mickey Guyton itemizing behaviour toward women that separates men from boys both literally and figuratively—is not just uncommonly progressive for country music. It’s uncommonly progressive for mankind.

As if all that weren’t enough, there’s also the preposterously charming “Lightning Bug,” a knock-kneed valentine to a lover that’s practically garlanded in fairy lights and dusted with sparkles. The bar has been definitively raised.

Boys was released November 18, 2020
Listen to it here.