Dark Sky Paradise

G.O.O.D./Def Jam

Big Sean

Big Sean clings to vowels like a race car driver to turns — tenaciously and mind-numbingly, returning to them constantly for fear of slipping off the track.

He has always been a technical rapper but rarely a fun one, managing to squeeze the thrill out of his pyrotechnics, sometimes cramming so many words into phrases that he sounds nervous.

But after a few years of mechanically rearranging sounds into sentences, Big Sean has begun to become sentient. In the last year, he’s made real strides toward lucidity, and on Dark Sky Paradise, his third and best album, he is more human than ever before.

Of course, much of this comes in the wake of Drake, who has made emotional terrain safe for those around him, and to whom this version of Big Sean feels indebted. That’s clear from songs like I Know and the surprisingly vulnerable Win Some, Lose Some, on which Big Sean raps: “I just turned my mama hooptie to a new Caddy/People thinking I’m rich and I wish they knew that/I’ve been signed for four years and I’m just able to do that.”

At his best, Big Sean is a flexible rapper, which he displays here on production that ranges from an exultant single that has an unprintable title to the growling Paradise.

Lately, though, what Big Sean’s been known as is a great boyfriend — first at the side of the Glee actress Naya Rivera, and now with the pop-R&B siren Ariana Grande, with whom he is often seen public-snuggling (and who appears here on the cynical, amusing Research, a bonus track about mistrust in relationships).

So it’s only natural that on this album, he unifies the two sides of his personality — his love for vowels and his love for love — on Play No Games, a song built on a sample of Guy’s Piece Of My Love and which winks at Jodeci’s K-Ci Hailey. Here, Big Sean’s all devotion: “Chauffeur a Range for you/I’ll take that flight alone earlier in the day for you/Just to beat you there, prepare, and let you know I’m waiting for you.” It’s great that his heart is overflowing, but so are his verses.

— Jon Caramanica