Avicii is smart in pairing whiskey-drenched blues and folk melodies with dance production: songs like the skittering, acoustic-tinged “Gonna Love Ya” and the nearly honky-tonk piano bruiser “For A Better Day” seem like populist expansions of house music’s jazz and blues influences. Despite movements away from EDM, he retains his signature slick, color-block drops through creative song structure. Interspersed between fully-realized pop choruses (like on the brilliant, almost mythically-proportioned “Waiting for Love”) and scratchy and intimate verses (“Ten More Days”) are absolutely massive production breaks that insist on Avicii’s brand as both a songwriter and a DJ.
Over the course of fourteen songs, his instrumentation—folk band plus tropical house (plus Diplo, to be honest)—grows redundant, especially as his melodies are sung mostly by raspy-sounding men. “Broken Arrows,” the Zac Brown collaboration, borders on self-parody. But on the whole, Stories is a successful venture into the place where a pop-minded DJ can take EDM: a shiny, grand, and often thrilling melting pot of every genre on radio.