Honestly, Nevermind - Drake: Review
Drake
is, well he's Drake. You know who he is. After releasing a huge and hugely successful album with last years Certified Lover Boy he is taking a quick turnaround and returning with Honestly, Nevermind which was a surprise album dropped with no singles and limited promotion. It's also notable for being a shift in style for Drake featuring dance and house inspired beats throughout the tracklist.
Review By Lav:
The critics haven't been crazy about Drake for a while. In their defense he has slowed down his willingness to leave his comfort zone and turned up his willingness to pack his tracklist absolutely full of songs in recent years. But the Drake hate has always been blown DRASTICALLY out of proportion and it reached a fever pitch with this record. Whether it was the series of viral tweets claiming the record is department store music or the absolute meltdown had by dudes on the hiphopheads subreddit, it's clear that hating on Honestly, Nevermind is popular. Allow me to buck convention as I so often do with records that get piled on immediately. This album is okay, it's fine. Drake's singing vocals and refrains are a bit inconsistent but often decent and the beats have a nocturnal appeal thrughout that I quite enjoy. For every flaw the record has it also has a strength and they equal out when all is said and done to a record that is just plain average. If you see anybody with any kind of strong thoughts about it one way or the other, be suspicious.
Let's start with the highlights. which yes, there are a number of. The two songs that pretty much everybody has already agreed are great are the two rap songs. Sticky sees Drake rapping about his wealth and his mom in a way that feels very familiar and continually effective at portraying the grandeur of his life and status. Closing track Jimmy Cooks is even better and sees Drake teaming up with 21 Savage for a track where the two have overflowing chemistry. It's also even further proof that 21 Savage is one of the best featured artists around now.
Texts Go Green is another one of the better tracks on the first half of the record starting with the instrumental which features a series of quick quarter note drum kicks and a gracious piano interpolation that goes well together. Drake's lyrics about prior love often feel more impressionistic than specific but they still translate into memorable refrains. A Keeper is another song I found myself enjoying mostly because of the audacious but very catchy hook. It mirrors some of the toxicity Drake is always singing about from past relationships and while the way he choses to move on is harsh, it feels fitting. It also has a pretty minimal beat all the way through until a great rise in the final 30 seconds.
The second half of the record is a drop in quality from the first but is still features a song I like quite a bit in Tie That Binds. While I'm not head over heels for the instrumental intro I do like the spacious transition it makes once Drake starts to deliver his refrains. The refrains are incredibly sooth and of all the songs on the record this one probably fuses R&B and dance music the best.
Massive is a track that would be a highlight if you cut it's runtime in half. It's clearly one of the more radio ready songs with the bright pianos that never bury Drake's vocals despite how reserved they are. Unfortunately the nearly 6 minutes it spends wandering through that instrumental progression is at least a few minutes too long for me to fully get behind. I have a similar issue with the opener Falling Back which gets the record off to a decent start with its pulsating beat. But by the time Drake's incessant repetition of the title through a weak falsetto comes around I'm over the song.
More so than actively bad much of the second half of the record is just plain forgettable. Down Hill is an okay song even though the beat barely has a pulse. The redeeming factor comes through some charming refrains and group vocals that I think are really well interpolated. Overdrive and Flight's Booked are basically forgettable and even more forgettable even though the former does feature some of the better singing on the record I can hardly recall much of anything from either song even after repeated listens.
Calling My Name is basically a mirror of A Keeper except I don't find the refrains nearly as compelling as it shifts into a more earnest sense of love and lust at the start of a relationship. One of the songs you'll probably hear people talking about as particularly terrible is Currents, mostly because of the bed squeaking that's worked into the beat. Even without that I don't think it's one of the stronger songs here and none of the vocal lines nor the vocal samples really stick with me. I think my least favorite song of the bunch is Liability which sees Drake singing with his vocals pitched down. While I'm not against that idea in concept it completely robs him of any of the vocal affectations he would normally deliver and makes it completely impossible to take his sensual and emotional observations seriously.
The only word I can really use to describe this album is "Okay". After he's spent the past few years flirting with sub-par compilation albums and decent but bloated studio albums this is like Drake achieving a perfect equilibrium between good things and bad things. How it has elicited such a strong reaction from anybody is completely beyond me because there isn't anything here that's enough of an outlier, for better or for worse, to warrant it. 5/10
