ERYS - Jaden Smith: Review
is an actor, rapper and fashion icon who is the son of another famed multi-talented figure Will Smith. After releasing a number of songs as a child and an increasing output of singles Jaden saw fit to release his commercial debut record SYRE in 2017. He followed that very thematic concept album with the looser collection of tracks on the critically panned Sunset Tapes last year. Now with little notice Jaden is releasing his second true studio album and companion piece to SYRE, ERYS.
Review By Lavender:
I was worried going into ERYS for a number of reasons and I was kind of hoping Jaden would move on from this approach going forward. SYRE was a decent album with some high points in it's tracklist but one that ran far, far too long and featured plenty of misguided songs that served no purpose on the records themes or were sonic misses. Pair this with the painfully breezy brevity of Jaden's follow-up The Sunset Tapes and the fact that ERYS wouldn't have the benefit of starting off with great singles like Icon and Falcon I hoped Jaden had something special in store for us but I wasn't holding my breathe. As it turns out ERYS has a lot in common with SYRE including explosive and youthful highlights, and boring uninspired lows.
Much like SYRE started off with B L U and E this album does the same with four songs whose titles spell out PINK. This set and the record itself gets off to a pretty good start with the first two tracks, P features Willow singing an incredibly similar melody to what she performed on the intro of SYRE over a rewardingly driving piano ballad. Jaden matches her with his own auto-tuned singing that makes for a surprisingly beautiful introduction that I found myself enjoying quite a bit. I is another track I enjoy that features a punchy trap style beat, if you ignore some of Jaden's cringe-tastic lyrics and focus on his delivery then you'll see that is energy and flows are on point and it makes for a pretty energizing transition from the first song.
Unfortunately I am not as high on N and K. N is a little bit of a more lyrical focused rap song and there isn't much of the lyricism here that is compelling or really all that good to begin with. Jaden drops a few struggle bars here that really throw the whole thing off if you're paying any attention. K is a little bit better and pulls a ton of inspiration from modern J. Cole style jazz rap but is still far less impressive than the first two tracks here. Unfortunately it doesn't get any better from here as next up is Noize which features an awful blown out instrumental with the bass turned up so high you can barely tell whats going on musically. This is made even worse by the fact that Jaden is going for an absolutely blatant Travis Scott rip off in his psychedelic vocal effects to flow switch-ups and even some of the lyricism here seems straight out of Astroworld. Tyler, The Creator drops a verse at the end of the track but it certainly isn't an impressive one, he sounds straight out of 2011 and it continues to be tiring hearing Tyler reset his career years back in 2019. The Travis Scott impressions come up again on this album later in the songs Got It and Blackout.
While the tail end of this record is better than the first half it does get worse before it gets better. I-drip-or-is is a trap tune about as annoying as its name with some garish and ugly vocal effects that would ruin anything catchy about the song if there was anything catchy to ruin in the first place but there isn't. Mission is a patience testing song with a lot of build-up and no real payoff whatsoever, for some reason Trinidad James of all people pops up here and doesn't make the song any better. Whoever had the thought "Oh yeah you know who needs to hop on this track, Trinidad James" needs to be fired because I'm sure their bad decision making appears all over this record. Riot is the only other track here I hate and it is mainly because for a track called riot this is one of the tamest and more wallpaper quality songs I've heard all year. The song sounds like a boardroom of media executives designed a song capable of completely blending in with the modern music landscape and it sucks.
A handful of the tracks here contain some refreshing features that heighten the experience starting with Again which contains verses from both Jaden and Syre, the name of a character on this record who is trying to become a famous rapper, but in reality is Jaden rapping with auto-tune. This song kind of cheats and makes itself more interesting with the vocal switch-ups but given the fact that they are relative to the story I'm fine with it. Summertime In Paris is a dreamy soft rock tune that reminds me of some of the cloudier stuff from groups like The 1975 or Sundara Karma. Williow does a pretty bearable Rihanna impression on the song and Jaden switches up the singing to drop a true to form rap verse or two that keeps the song interesting and I ultimately enjoy it.
Chateau opens up with a killer A$AP Rocky feature, Free Flacko by the way. I love the beat and I wish Jaden would take the auto-tune off his voice for this track because it totally zaps all of the emotion out of his voice and I think this could have been a really good track with a clearer delivery from Jaden that matched Rocky's. Own My Own is a pretty good track with some wailing guitars and a dense dreamy mix. Jaden's hypnotic singing makes the track sound like a soft and meditative EDM tune. Even though I'm not head over heels for Kid Cudi's singing here I think it's bearable and fits the track well. Finally Fire Dept is a track I did not anticipate liking at all but is seriously one of my favorites here. The track is an honest to god pop punk song that gets off to a little bit of a rough start but really takes off in the second half when Jaden delivers a surprisingly passionate lead vocal that makes me wish he would honestly do stuff like this more. The blistering guitars and vocal melody on the bridge are pulling some heavy Green Day influence and probably hint at where some of the inspiration for this track came from.
Maybe I should have seen this coming given how much I enjoyed Lost Boy on SYRE, but two of my favorite songs on the entire record are two of its longest. Pain has some serious compositional weight to it and works its way through multiple phases over its six minute runtime. The cloudy minimalism actually reminds me of some of the more stark moments on Lost Boy and I definitely think this track is meant to serve as its spiritual successor. Finally the closing track here EYRS is a huge improvement from the title track of SYRE and leaves the record off on a great note as Jaden wears his heart on his sleeve one last time for one of the most intimate songs here.
ERYS is truly a successor to SYRE in nearly every way both good and bad. While I think I maybe like SYRE just a bit more they both feature songs with youthful and catchy mantras that I enjoy and also a number of tracks that see Jaden blatantly pulling from his influences and dumbing down contemporary sounds. There is a pretty solid album in EYRS but there is far too much filler for the projects own good and getting to the good songs can often be a slog, especially in the first half of the album. While I have a feeling Jaden will keep up his same sonic approach on whatever project he releases next I do hope that he ditches this format and maybe creates something equally thematic but shorter and more focused because his story telling too often gets muddied and aimless by the end of these projects. That being said there are certainly some tracks that I loved from EYRS, but much of it I won't be returning to. 5/10
