Certified Lover Boy - Drake: Review
Drake
is the biggest artist on earth, and frankly it really isn't even close. From his streaming dominance, to his radio dominance to his chart dominance across numerous genres Drake has been an absolutely unstoppable force of commercial music for years. After setting numerous Billboard and streaming records with his 2018 record Scorpion Drake has already started tearing down his previous accomplishments with Certified Lover Boy in just the records first few days.
Review By Lav:
Compared to the general public I've never been one of the massive Drake fans that you most likely know and interact with on Twitter occasionally. But compared to most music critics I've been far more positive on Drake's output, particularly in recent years, than many major outlets. While Views and Scorpion are both undeniably bloated there is also no denying the highlights that run throughout. Drake overcame this on his More Life playlist which featured contributions from a number of other talented artists to break up some typical monotony and made for my favorite project of his since 2015's If You're Reading This It's To Late. But after revisiting Take Care for my Top 50 Albums of 2011 list earlier this year I was craving another record that matched the flashy, charismatic blend of pop and rap that Take Care does so flawlessly. While Certified Lover Boy does have moments where Drake is near his best, the tracklist is far longer than it needed to be and packed full of mediocre songs.
There's no good or organized way to tackle these 21 tracks. They are presented largely without any meaning or progression to their order, so lets just start at the very beginning. Champagne Poetry is a lowkey monologue like intro with gentle vocal samples dusting the background while Drake delivers his typical blend of industry focused big talk. The second half of the track features an expanded beat and a topical shift to Drake's mentality and personal life which sees him raising the intensity of both the lyrics and the performance as it goes on making for a pretty solid opener. Love All is another lowkey victory lap for Drake on how content he has become, but he also spends a bit too much time on the track thinking about all the things other people are doing wrong. Thankfully Jay-Z shows up on the back end of the track to deliver a pretty good verse full of some classic Hov advice. Speaking of collabs Fair Trade sees Drake teaming up with Travis Scott for expectedly pretty good results. Drake kicks it off over a spacey beat with a blend of raping and singing that shows off a bit more intensity and dramatics than his standard performance. Travis is surprisingly introspective on the back end and the song turns out pretty good, even though I wish Drake and Travis interacted a little bit more with each other on the song.
If you don't like Way 2 Sexy I have to seriously question your ability to enjoy anything. The song is a flip of Right Said Fred's I'm Too Sexy where Future, Young Thug and Drake spend a few minutes hilariously flexing their looks and style. While its not the most creative, original or lyrical song you'll ever hear it is incredibly fun. Pipe Down is a pretty good blend of Drake's various styles with a beat that employs some interesting percussion. The whole song sees Drake diving into the details of a specific relationship through a variety of methods. The best part of the song is Drake's singing on the bridge and hook and I've enjoyed the track every time I've listened to the album. Yebba's Heartbreak is a More Life style interlude handled entirely by Yebba who I've heard give some decent performances on Mark Ronson and Stormzy records in recent years. She does a pretty good job over the stark piano instrumental and I think more tracks like this could have helped the record a lot.
I know people like to complain about how much Drake raps about industry stuff but No Friends In The Industry is actually a pretty great song. Not only does Drake have more than enough clout to rep his tight circle and decade of massive musical success but he does it over a great instrumental full of slick features and a hard-hitting beat. Knife Talk is a song that just fucking rules, there's no two ways about it. It all kicks off with Project Pat of all people lending the song gangster credit with an opening monologue. The track itself sees Issa Knife himself 21 Savage trading off short verses with Drake and showing off a surprising amount of chemistry over a cold piano instrumental. I can already see people complaining about Drake's past not living up to his gangster lyricism but at some point he is just cosigning his way into legitimacy and alongside Pat and Savage, he does so.
Those highlights are littered amongst the first 13 tracks but the record has patches of extreme inconsistency throughout numerous portions of the album. While those moments, plus the records length may give many listeners a reason to tune out I actually recommend seeing it through because the last 5 tracks are the only sustained run of success on the record. Get Along Better is an R&B cut with a hard-hitting beat and an always welcome Ty Dolla $ign feature. Drake sings his ass off on the track with an array of wonderful backing vocals behind him and I was consistently surprised that a song this good was buried in the tracklist. You Only Live Twice is a glitzy rap song that opens up with a Rick Ross feature where he is spitting more facts per bar than you'd normally expect from him. Pair that with some wordplay that only Drake would write and an exciting Lil Wayne feature and you've got another one of the records best tracks.
IMY2 is one of the better Kid Cudi features I've ever heard where he is actually interpolated into the song rather than sounding like he doesn't belong at all. His vocals are more tolerable than usual but the real highlight is how Drake and Cudi set up each other's refrains and strengthen the track overall. If I were Drake I wouldn't release a song called Fucking Fans but at the very least it's not what it sounds like. It's another two part song both of which focus on Drake continuing to grow and improve himself as a person. Like seemingly every song here I enjoy the second half more but the thematic focus throughout is what really keeps me around. Finally, if Pusha T ruined Scorpion's closing track March 14 with his diss track, The Remorse is Drake's opportunity to do an introspective closer over again and he nails it. The murky drums and frontal piano are a great combo and Drake manages to genuinely wear his heart on his sleeve and tribute everyone that has been their for him over his decade plus career in music.
One of the things I was happy to hear on CLB was that there aren't very many truly terrible songs. Given that Scorpion had some real duds on it I see this as a big improvement. Papi's Home is a fine song with a sweet pop rap instrumental that deals primarily in love and romance. The most notable thing about it is featuring an unlisted Nicki Minaj interlude but overall it sounds just like dozens of other Drake songs. Girls Want Girls is the song everyone has been talking about because Drake calls himself a lesbian. Aside from that line it's a pretty standard Drake love song with some light R&B flavors and even a half decent Lil Baby feature, it could be much worse. Fountains is the token Drake dancehall song and while it's not the worst I've ever heard from him I still wouldn't say he does the genre justice. At the very least the featured artist gives a half decent performance and I wasn't that familiar with her music going into the record.
The worst thing on the entire album is the first half of N 2 Deep which features a borderline unlistenable jagged R&B instrumental with a janky mix and some of the worst refrains I've ever heard in a Drake song. It's a shame because the second half is kind of a banger where Drake and Future drop a catchy verse and hook combo. It's really hard to make anything out of a track like this. Drake is known to get on people's nerves with his lyrics and subject matter, in particular some of his snobbier critics. The only point on the record where I can't help but be annoyed by his lyrics is TSU. It's a very patronizing song about a girl Drake knows whose trying to start a business and "go legit". If you can ignore the lyrics it has a tolerable hook but there is also an annoying time wasting intro. Even the more sincere back half of the track doesn't do much to re-contextualize it.
Some of the most patience testing songs on the entire record are the ones that abandon structure altogether. In The Bible is one of the longest songs here and while it's individual parts are tolerable they have nothing to do with each other. Going from an okay Lil Durk feature, to Giveon belting some emotional balladry, to Drake delivering a very unspectacular performance each with aimless instrumental transitions feels incredibly exhausting. 7am On A Bridle Path features the most stark beat on an already pretty instrumentally spacious record. If you like Drakeisms this song is for you as he splits plenty of his classic bars that are somehow both wordplay and not really wordplay at all. The song is fine but given the incredibly sparse sound and continuous unbroken stream of rapping it feels like it goes on forever with no shifts anywhere. Finally there's Race My Mind which is a bit of an instrumental antithesis to the rest of the record with a simple trap beat at its core and a bunch of synths and effects overlaced. There is an annoying harp string interpolation that lays over and over and gets annoying fast. The biggest issue with the song is that Drake clearly has a lot to say but does nothing to format it. The results sound like a 4 minute interlude where all he does is get some stuff off his chest with a half flow.
Certified Lover Boy isn't terrible, but it isn't great either. While the record has enough great songs that I'm not comfortable making blanket critiques of the whole thing, it also wastes a ton of time with songs that you could forget while still listening to them. The lack of true duds is refreshing but it comes tethered with the fact that even the highlights here aren't likely to be among the best rap or even the best pop rap you hear this year. The silver lining is that Drake has improved on selecting collaborators with plenty of impressive features and even more impressive beats in the tracklist.
If only there was a similar rap album by a major artist that was recently released with almost EXACTLY the same problems that I could compare Certified Lover Boy to. Oh well. 6/10
This cover is great. The way that Drake's team markets his work is extremely smart and relies on social media. This cover has been a topic between myself and many other creative directors, all of us agreeing that it's genius. While the concept is super simple it took the internet by storm and they made it into a meme, giving their own twists on it. It's gotten remakes from big brands like Doritos and Pepsi and artists like Lil Nas X plus a multitude of fan versions. This is a great way to get an already anticipated album more traction. That in itself makes this an awesome cover and one I wasn't expecting. 9/10
