1UP - T-Pain: Review
T-Pain
is a Florida rapper, singer and producer who was everywhere in popular music throughout the late 2000's as he blew up dropping multiple #1 albums and appearing on numerous bit hit singles as a featured artist. Though he's been around for nearly 15 years T-Pain has only 6 studio albums to his belt and after a hot start, any music at all has been hard to come by in the 2010's and the quality has been noticeably hit or miss.
Review By Lavender:
Who doesn't love some good old T-Pain? Songs like I'm Sprung, Buy U A Drank and Can't Believe It may be dated but for those of us that remember a time when the man was everywhere they are veritable classics. And that isn't even touching on some killer features like Chris Brown's Kiss Kiss, Kanye West's Good Life and Flo Rida's Low. But even for those of us that loved his tracks back in the day it is hard to say much about his output in this decade, which is why it's so surprising some of the highs this record hits in between its mediocre lows.
1UP gets off to a VERY hot start, and I don't say that often, if you're surprised by that just listen to the first two tracks. Starting off with the title track and opener T-Pain dishes out some seriously genuine words of advice for his younger contemporaries playing on his experiences and mistakes as an artist. Profit Dinero does a pretty tight Andre 3000 impression on the second half but the song leaves in its wake a strong feeling of positivity and optimism as well as a good tune. This track is followed by the best song on the entire album, the Boosie Badazz featuring RIP To The Parking Lot a fantastically heartfelt tune that sees T-Pain calling back to his come-up and the people that we're there with him. The hook is absolutely killer and shows off the singing chops that made him such a hot commodity in his heyday. Boosie doesn't drop the best verse of his career but the track is well off even with his okay performance and is guaranteed to stick in your head. This same ideology pops up again with the friendship banger It's My Dog Birthday later on in the album with a song that is not quite as good but remains a lot of fun.
Some good tunes that take a different approach include the story driven Keep This From Me that dives into the logistics of cheating in great detail and the way that it affects people in a fast paced tune. As well as A Million Times which is one of the more solid all around tunes to be found on the project, but the real outside highlight in the closer. Goat Talk is an old school banger that hits all the right notes through T-Pain's buttery smooth delivery and a fiery Lil Wayne verse, who has been absolutely on fire recently. Unfortunately it's the rest of the tracks here that show why the 2010's have left T-Pain behind.
U-Up is a big drop off from the great opening songs, its dated immediately on impact and sounds like what would be one of the more forgettable cuts on his first two albums. It isn't strictly the fact that the song is so dated either, there is just a far to generic and forgettable progression and an underwhelming tune at its core. It's followed immediately by another awful crooner with this albums only single Getcha Roll On which features an awful guest verse from Tory Lanez, a completely flat chorus, corny lyrics and very badly implemented chipmunky auto tune.
Even when it comes to some good ideas or lyrics T-Pain sometimes misses hard in the execution, Be Your X is a cute and fun song idea but the track itself is painfully forgettable from front to back and the mostly complacent instrumental does nothing to help it. Same thing on Here It Comes where once again a feature at the end of the track is hard to bear, this time its from the always hard to bear Russ. But even some of the more heartfelt and genuine tracks fail to land such as We All We Got which shows just how dated T-Pain is sounding when he goes for an interpolation of Drake's In My Feelings hook and misses badly. As well as a track like All I Want where Flipp Deniro actually comes with a pretty solid verse but the track around it is just painfully underwhelming.
T-Pain beat my expectations on this one, by providing a handful of good tracks the wind back the clock in a really smooth way there is still a lot here that is very questionable and songs I'm surprised anyone was okay with releasing. Ultimately this is a solid late career addition to a respected discography in popular music, but not one that will make any kind of big splash. 4.5/10
