It’s a perfectly serviceable album, as one might expect, given the pedigree of those involved. But it’s hard to imagine it being met with anything but bemusement at the Grand Ole Opry.

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The highest bar the music reaches is being decent, and the loftiest ambition of these songs is to be simply tolerated, packed in amongst other unremarkable tunes on an Apple Music playlist called ‘Tuesday Vibes’ or something similar.

The idea behind the project is to expand his horizons while nodding at his roots, but Snake Oil also feels like a canny way to ride the streaming-core wave, where seemingly contradictory styles exist in harmony on a variety of play lists.

Trickled down from the success of “Old Town Road” and the meme-level pervasiveness of the yeehaw agenda, the ubiquitous producer’s purported country album suffocates in treacly kitsch.

Diplo's second album might be a cheeky bid to stake out a spot in Nashville, but the end result is largely a bummer, a collection of dourly self-conscious "chill" accessorized with the kind of cheap cowboy hat that gets left behind on the way to the festival parking lot.

Billed as a country album, this is actually business as usual for the EDM star, who's dressed up his generic pop songs in rhinestones and tassels.

Rven Thomas Wesley himself must know that his latest is little more than a classic Diplo offering dressed up to try and fool the masses.

By failing to commit fully to straight pop craftsmanship or to genre-bending experimentation, the project feels lyrically bland and sonically uninspired.

A record that aims for a triumphant shoot out but only fires blanks, it just goes to show that you can stick a saddle on any old mustang, but that doesn’t make it a racehorse.

To subtitle the album “Snake Oil” just about sums up the whole sorry package.

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White Lil Nas X.

What a strange place for country music to go.

As country continues to slowly shift into this new realm where it can meet with pop and hip hop, Diplo somehow was able to secure arguably way too many big names in country, pop and hip hop for an amalgamation of ideas that never gel in the way that they should. It's about as directly pop as it can get, and not in the progressive and artful way but the obnoxious and radio-tailored way.

The greatest failure of Snake Oil is complete blandness. ... read more

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