Luke Bryan, "Kill the Lights"

“KILL THE LIGHTS”

Capitol Records Nashville

Luke Bryan turned 39 last month, and it’s safe to surmise that his hips are getting tired. For the last few years, he’s been playing a young man’s game — his brand of country music is dynamic, attitudinal and a little goofy.

Every spring break for the last seven years, Bryan has played a show for hundreds of thousands of swimsuit-clad partygoers — the revelry has become part of his brand. But this year, Bryan announced his March performance in Panama City, Florida, would be his last of the kind. It was time to grow up. What a drag.

“Kill the Lights,” Bryan’s fifth studio album, is his most mature and almost studiously un-fun. It’s the sort of flattening that’s happened to Alan Jackson and Brad Paisley, to Tim McGraw and Blake Shelton. Bryan is trading in his youthful vim for something more measured.

Here, the transition is literal: The first two songs are familiar Bryan turf. “Kick the Dust Up” is a rural party anthem — “We go way out where there ain’t nobody/We turn this cornfield into a party” — with Bryan’s voice sweetened just a bit with Auto-tune. That’s followed by the title track, a gleaming chunk of disco-country that’s almost sensuous (though not quite).

Then Bryan hits the brakes. Apart from “Move,” a Montgomery Gentry-esque song about feral attraction, the rest of this album finds Bryan mellow, or trying to be.

He can be tender, though, as he is on “Fast” and the maudlin slow jam “Strip It Down.” When that tenderness turns to wistfulness, Bryan is at home, as on “Just Over,” where he’s nursing a breakup, his voice shivering, and on the album’s closing ballad, “Scarecrows,” an outstanding paean to rowdy rural teenage living (“Just some ol’ plowboys pretending we’re cowboys”) that is among Bryan’s best songs.

— John Caramanica,

New York Times