Another month rolls in, and as I predicted last month the new albums from Kanye West and especially Drake cut a swathe through the Hot 100, really limiting what other material was able to break the top 40. Shame that those records weren’t better but it did result in a pleasingly short list of songs to get through in what was a busy week for me personally, hence the slightly late publication. We’re kicking things off in hip-hop as well:
“Sharing Locations” by Meek Mill ft. Lil Baby & Lil Durk
Peak #22, Current #61
This is the lead single from Meek’s just-released fifth studio album Expensive Pain, featuring the now familiar duo of Lil Baby & Lil Durk. Probably the most noteworthy aspect of this is that the three of them don’t drop verses in turn, instead they trade bars in a seemingly random order, swapping in and out. Quite a nice idea, but doesn’t disguise the fact that this is otherwise a very by-the-numbers trap song. Ominous fast-paced beat, generic content, not that strong of a hook either. The flows are pretty decent but otherwise it’s nothing to write home about.
5.5/10
“family ties” by Baby Keem & Kendrick Lamar
Peak #18, Current #38
This track is taken from Baby Keem’s debut album The Melodic Blue, but let’s be real we’re all tuning in for Kendrick, with this being his first single as a lead artist since Pray For Me way back in early 2018, with only a sparse list of guest appearances since then. Nonetheless, Keem isn’t going to be a complete passenger on his own song as he turns in a pretty decent performance, with maybe not the most amazing wordplay but eccentric delivery, fun flows and an extremely cold beat switch mid-way through his verse as the extravagant horn loop gives way to thumping drum kicks.
However, when Kendrick comes in he really does take over the track. The beat again switches, this time into something altogether more menacing and dramatic, signalling that you need to sit up and pay attention. His verse is just a massive flex but I’ve always liked this sort of content coming from Kendrick because he has the career and quality to actually justify it, and something about his voice always sounds great when delivering this sort of aggressive boasting. Probably not quite as many quotable lines as I’d like, and I wish things got a little more wild (I might actually prefer this duo’s other collab Range Brothers for this reason), but regardless Kendrick’s bar construction remains on a far higher level than virtually all of his contemporaries and as I say, his delivery makes this fun as hell to listen to.
The fact that this is the first new Kendrick material in ages, plus the multiple beat switches and lack of a hook do make this a bit of a one-time song where I’m not really sure how far into the future I’ll actually revisit this. But for now it’s a pretty solid banger, I dig it.
7.5/10
“Hurricane” by Kanye West
Peak #6, Current #31
September finally saw the release of the much-teased Donda. This was not a rollout I engaged with at all. Kanye West has long since stopped being a good enough artist for me to hang on his every last word and teaser, especially when multiple projects have been delayed or just outright scrapped (still waiting on that Yandhi release that was apparently finished three years ago). When Donda did finally arrive, I have to admit that I only really half-listened to it. It’s nearly two hours long, I really can’t be bothered giving it the required 3-4 focused listens in order to form a well-considered opinion. I stuck it on whilst doing something else and just allowed most of it to wash over me. From what I picked up on, it largely continued in the same vein as his other post-MBDTF albums in taking a minimalist approach to production and an almost complete lack of editing. The result is a lot of empty space with a few moments of inspiration on the way that will convince the die-hard fans that he’s “still got it”, but that don’t really do enough to make an album this long worthwhile.
Anyrate, naturally one of the better songs will be the one that sticks around and that is the case here. For some reason the guest artists on this record don’t get an actual credit but they really should as in this case The Weeknd frankly carries the song. His hook is absolutely fantastic, he sounds incredible delivering this haunting refrain over very murky, low-mixed instrumentation, it’s probably the highlight of the whole album. Kanye’s own contributions are also decent, dropping a heartfelt, focused verse reflecting on his own mistakes and self-destructiveness.
Lil Baby’s inclusion is slightly unnecessary dropping the same, “Used to be broke but now I’m successful” verse that he does on every other song that really doesn’t add anything here. Although the bigger problem is really with how the verse sounds. Lil Baby’s mushy voice is never a good sound, but the way it’s mixed here sounds way more low-quality than the rest of the song and it’s quite distracting. Similarly The Weeknd’s lengthy chorus feels almost like a separate song in its own right, and whilst I do like the idea of the backing vocals on the “don’t let me drown” line, the way it’s edited just sounds really bad as the gospel vocals cut in and then out really abruptly and it just sounds odd.
I guess this track makes for an accurate microcosm of some of the better material on recent Kanye albums. There’s some good ideas, a flash of brilliance, and then slightly shoddy execution and a lack of refinement lets it down. The hook is still great enough to make this work regardless, but it could’ve been even better.
7.5/10
“Knife Talk” by Drake ft. 21 Savage & Project Pat
Peak #4, Current #8
Sigh. Drake’s ability to simultaneously get worse and more popular is one of the most baffling and frustrating sagas of the last five years in popular music. It seems as though he can really do anything and he will not only avoid any backlash or falloff, but somehow get bigger and bigger. Certified Lover Boy is his worst album to date. Yeah it’s worse than Scorpion. Say what you will about that album (and yes it’s also bad) but Nice For What is one of Drake’s best ever songs, and there were at least a handful of other tracks on there that you could happily stand up for. CLB simply has nothing, I was asleep by track four. He sort of has the opposite problem to Kanye. Ye has a million ideas, some of which are good, but has a complete inability to focus so delivers all-over-the-place projects with a few bright sparks obscured by rampant inconsistency and sloppy mixing and sequencing. CLB sounds very expensive, carefully, meticulously assembled, but it just offers nothing. It sounds like a lot of effort went in to making this but just with zero inspiration.
Given Drake’s obscene popularity you could really call any track off this record a hit (indeed every single track broke the top 40) but I don’t want to torture myself and bore you too much so we’ll just stick with the three most popular, of which this track is the best. A glistening backdrop of keys and minor synths lays the foundation for Drake and 21 Savage to deliver verses of mostly forgettable gang talk. They’re both decent at sounding menacing, but it’s also quite boring especially given 21’s complete refusal to use the slightest hint of melody in any of his hooks, with this one being predictably flat and repetitive.
The bars aren’t exactly cutthroat either as both men get distracted and go off on tangents concerning cars, jewellery, holidays in Turks and Caicos, and for some reason tennis. There’s also this slightly bizarre four-line aside from 21 where he starts using child-like language that just sounds really out-of-place and the furthest thing from intimidating: “Keep blickies, and you know the weed sticky, My finger itchy, the Glock like to leave hickeys, Your shooters iffy, a street punk could never diss me, I come straight up out the 6, and we don’t spare sissies“. Bit of a mood killer.
Decent production, alright vibe for the most part but not that good of a track overall. Sadly things do get much worse…
5/10
“Girls Want Girls” by Drake ft. Lil Baby
Peak #2, Current #13
Now this one is just straight terrible. The best way I can describe this is that it sounds like a parody of a modern Drake track. It genuinely sounds like something that somebody moderately competent in FL Studio would make in two minutes to take the piss, from the uber-generic instrumental, to the recycled flow that so predictably breaks out into a little sing-song before the chorus, down to the lyrics. The fucking lyrics. I’ve always hated these sort of Drake songs where it sounds like he’s talking to some off-camera girl for the whole thing, where every line is “you say” this and “you got” that, fucking tedious as hell.
Then we have the crux of the track, the whole “girls want girls” thing. I don’t feel especially well positioned to comment on this, but it just feels wrong. I would happily take the “say that you a lesbian, girl me too” line as a joke if there were anything remotely comedic about the rest of the track but there isn’t. It sounds like the most typical Drake song ever with lesbian fetishization casually thrown in, which makes it all the worse.
I thought Lil Baby might provide some relief, but surprisingly he makes things worse. I mentioned earlier that he has a habit of massively lowering the audio quality whenever he appears as a feature, but it’s especially noticeable here because the rest of the song sounds so artificially clean including Drake’s edgeless vocals. So when Lil Baby appears with his usual horribly slurred and autotuned delivery it just sounds awful and kills the one thing that this track had going for it, which was the pristine recording quality. It’s not like the actual verse is any good either, if anything Baby sounds even more consumed by the creepy lesbian fetishizing than Drake did, he really doubles down on it. “She like eating pussy I’m like me too” – odds of this conversation having ever happened: 1000/1.
Yeah this is a rubbish song. Comically lazy in its construction and performances, with a messily included feature and a generally unwelcome attitude. And more than anything else, it’s just boring, again. Sucks.
2/10
“Way 2 Sexy” by Drake ft. Future & Young Thug
Peak #1, Current #3
And now for Drake’s other big embarrassment, albeit one that I have considerably less distaste for. The key difference here is that this song does on some level feel like a joke. I mean nobody sincerely interpolates Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy for a trap song and does so with a straight face, it’s not possible. And this is a self-focused song as well, there’s no creepy obsession with the opposite sex, which is a bonus.
The problem however, is that it’s just boring. The hook might make you smile the first time you hear it, but beyond that there’s no ironic enjoyment to be gained because it just drags on and on. The synth-led beat is a bit of a headache after a while, it’s pretty tediously repetitive and there’s no actual jokes beyond the sample. I guess at least this song has something to mark it out from the oodles of album filler, but like I say it very quickly defaults back to boring. Not the worst but still far from good.
4/10
“Have Mercy” by Chlöe
Peak #28, Current #56
This is the debut single from Chlöe Bailey, one half of sister R&B duo Chloe x Halle. I’m sensing strong Normani vibes here. What I mean by this is that we have somebody who already has a disproportionately large amount of online hype prior to releasing any solo material, and with music critics similarly desperate to over-hype anything she does right from the off. And I think this really comes from the same reasons as Normani as well, namely that she’s a young black woman who is a good dancer and unreasonably attractive – for a lot of people this is an exciting thing to get behind, and for music publications they think it makes them look good if they praise them. The fact that she has massive backing from Beyoncé doesn’t hurt either.
Anyway, as you no doubt will know by now, I don’t care for any of this marketing bullshit since I’m only interested in the music, and unsurprisingly this does nothing for me. This sounds like it was created with the intention of going viral on TikTok and absolutely nothing else. Well that mission was actually a success, so I guess it’s a job well done but it doesn’t make the song any more interesting. It’s about how impressive her ass is, it’s not at all interesting in its presentation or delivery, and the composition is basic. It reminds me a lot of Beyoncé songs in this lane, and I’d actually put this on a similar level of quality, but I don’t really mean that as a compliment. Just not my thing, it has its audience and they’re welcome to it.
5/10
“Shivers” by Ed Sheeran
Peak #16, Current #17
Ed Sheeran drops his second single from upcoming record =, following up the modestly successful Bad Habits. I say modestly, it naturally spent eleven weeks at #1 here in The UK because we have no taste, but on a broader level it didn’t seem to connect in the way his previous smashes have. This track sees him double down on the nocturnal synth-pop framework laid down by the lead single, but to far worse results.
The reason Bad Habits mostly worked for me was because it completely stripped away all of Ed’s personality and trademark musical tendencies. Ed trying to make a smooth, nighttime jam can work if it sounds nothing like him, and that’s exactly what he pulled off on that track. His vocals were totally clean, the production was minimalist and refined to a point, the lyrics were fairy banal and harmless, and as a result the whole song went over quite smoothly with the helping of a propulsive dance beat.
Shivers is more like a meeting between an anonymous dance-pop song and Ed’s signature singer-songwriter style, and the result is rather horrible. The plucky, dramatic beat could hardly sound more ridiculous opposite Ed’s acoustic strumming on the chorus, and the whole song sounds very hollow in a way that many modern trap-influenced pop songs tend to do, it has the vibe of something like a Maroon 5 song. Ed is also singing with way too much intensity where you can hear his voice crack and strain on the chorus, which is just not the sound you want at all for this type of track.
There’s a similar problem with the lyrics where instead of defaulting to vague cliches as on Bad Habits, he tries to throw in some of his trademark dialect which only serves to further sour the track for me. “I never kissed a mouth that tastes like yours” – this is not the first time that Ed has talked about tasting peoples’ mouths and it’s not getting any better. It sounds yucky. “Lipstick on my guitar” – sounds similarly rank and doesn’t actually mean anything. “I wanna kiss your eyes, I wanna drink your smile” – how is Ed still this bad at writing romantic metaphors I don’t get it. The rest of the track is full of generic hookup lines that again just make me feel a bit sick coming out of Ed’s mouth over this gentrified, hollow acoustic-pop instrumental, the whole vibe of the track is just not appealing in the slightest.
What this track really makes me think is “this must be what people who claim to hate Ed Sheeran’s music think all of his music sounds like”. A totally washed-out, painfully basic mesh of acoustic guitars, dance beats, thin vocals, awkward lyrics and melodies that sound like they were the product of a Capital FM listeners’ focus group. Probably the closest comparison in Ed’s discography is Shape of You, but I always thought that track mixed Ed’s old style with pop sellout in a smooth and effective way, its runaway success wasn’t a surprise to me at all. Shivers can’t even come close to emulating its predecessor on any front, and given the way the musical landscape has progressed in the nearly five years since, Ed is left feeling a little left behind on this one.
It may be quite catchy, but there’s actually a difference between catchy and memorable. This is the type of song that sounds annoyingly catchy whilst you’re listening to it, but you’re unlikely to find yourself humming it hours later. It’s all too familiar, too toothless, frankly too boring. Doesn’t appeal to me, if you’re going to go synth-pop you’ve got to all in, become somebody new. Leave the acoustic guitars and mouth tasting behind.
3/10
“A-O-K” by Tai Verdes
Peak #39, Current #39
I knew I’d hate this song the first time I heard a five second clip of the singer cheerily declaring “I’ll be A-O, A-OK!” over a watery acoustic-trap beat. No thank you, I don’t need any of that. The full song did not change my mind, if anything it got worse. Tai Verdes is an intensely annoying frontman, the production is peppy trash, the relentless fake happiness is instantly grating, and the lyrics are decidedly trash. It’s a nothing of a song that I can’t be bothered giving any more thought or listens to at the moment, I just know that I resent it. 2021’s Sunday Best but worse, and if this ends up being a genuine hit then I’ll explain why that is such an accurate comparison in my worst list. Worthless.
1/10
“Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version)” by Taylor Swift
Peak #37, Current #37
After a long break we’re back with Taylor’s re-recordings, albeit slightly out of sequence. Following on from Fearless, the next album to be updated will be Red in November, but we’re taking a short detour through 1989.
Close followers of Taylor such as myself will have been aware for some time that Wildest Dreams had already been re-recorded, since it was featured in a trailer for the animated film Spirit Untamed that was released in March. A few weeks’ ago the original track started going viral on TikTok so Taylor decided to jump out-of-order and release the full new version now. I respect her brazenness in capitalizing on this uptick in popularity for the track, I mean part of the reason for doing these new versions is to devalue the originals so if you already have the track finished then why wouldn’t you release it now?
Anyhow, given that I’m not much of a stickler for minor production details, I again don’t have much to say about the differences, or lack thereof, in this version compared to the original. Her voice is stronger and the bridge sounds a bit different but otherwise I’m just hearing the original. Nothing wrong with that though, because the original is great. Not best-pop-of-the-decade great like Blank Space or Style, but still an excellent, dreamy power ballad. I appreciate how even four albums later she still doesn’t have another song in her discography that really sounds anything like this; somewhere midway between baroque pop, dream pop, Lana Del Rey artiness and 80s extravagance. The imagery is vivid, the tune is strong and now more than ever Taylor’s performance is commanding. Definitely not my favourite single from 1989 but it had some damn stiff competition, and seven years’ later it’s sounding better than ever.
8/10
“Cold Beer Calling My Name” by Jameson Rodgers ft. Luke Combs
Peak #29, Current #29
You guys remember Jameson Rodgers right? How could you not? He had that crappy semi-hit Some Girls last year that absolutely nobody cared about and now he’s got a second hit thanks to being buddies with Luke Combs. I guess it is all about connections in the country world.
Song is exactly what you’d expect. Couple of dudes singing about beer over some rocking guitars. Luke Combs is a great singer, Jameson Rodgers isn’t. It’s like Beer Never Broke My Heart, except less good and half of it is sung by some dude who sounds like he won a prize draw to get to duet with Luke. Aggressively average.
5/10
“THATS WHAT I WANT” by Lil Nas X
Peak #10, Current #10
We end with the latest single from Lil Nas X’s debut album Montero, released last month. Whilst certainly no flop, I think it’s fair to say the record didn’t exactly set the world on fire upon its release, which backs up where I think he is as an artist right now in terms of popularity. He has a reasonably large fanbase who have completely bought into his personality and story, and he has the ability to create viral moments, but he’s not somebody capable of making much of a wider connection. His appeal to most rap fans is quite limited for a number of reasons, some of which are a bit messy so we won’t go there, and whilst he does fit more naturally into the tastes of pop fans, that isn’t really that huge of a demographic in the streaming age. Again, if he keeps pulling bizarre stunts (like making himself pregnant for some reason) then he’ll attract enough attention to sustain a mainstream career, but I’m not surprised that despite the big singles he’s unable to make the real demographic-snatching push of an Olivia Rodrigo or Morgan Wallen.
As for the music itself, I thought Montero was alright. It has its bangers and its more personal moments, but my long-standing issues surrounding the production and vocals haven’t gone away, preventing almost all of it from going beyond “decent”. This track is the next single, and it’s unusual in that there’s no real gimmick this time around, not even from the music video, it’s just a very straightforward pop song about wanting somebody to love. The flow of the verses is quite nice and leads into a big singalong hook, with the whole song smoothly skipping along with a fresh, upbeat vibe. Unfortunately when you take away any gimmicks, I just don’t think you’re left with that much here. I don’t mind straightforward lyrics but there’s just not a lot here to latch onto and Lil Nas doesn’t possess the power or emotion to sell the hook in the best way. In fact he sounds slightly strained, especially on the “that’s what I fucking want” which sounds more like a petulant child begging for a toy than a soul-bearing quest for love.
So once again a Lil Nas X song just leaves me not feeling much. I probably prefer him gimmick-free, but it doesn’t mean that the music underneath has actually got any more interesting. Vaguely pleasant sure, but in a year where have legit pop-rock bangers (which I’m somehow seeing some people describe this song as) like Good 4 U being smash hits, this just doesn’t hit that hard. Not bad, not that interesting either.
5.5/10
September average: 4.9/10
Worth listening to: “Wildest Dreams (Taylor’s Version)”, “family ties”, “Hurricane”
🙂
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