DISASTROUS ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Republic ★✩✩✩✩
We need to talk about Drake. Wish we didn’t. Wish we didn’t need even to think about Drake. But he’s quite possibly the most popular music act on the planet. There he squats, atop the charts, a dead weight, mountainous and torpid. We need to acknowledge that Drake has become terribly dull. And his sixth album is perhaps the dullest thing he’s done yet.
Certified Lover Boy is nigh on 90 minutes of whining, boasting, creepiness and self-pity, all of them unlovable traits that other rappers have nonetheless found interesting ways of expressing. But not our boy here. Not for a long time. Drake was refreshing once, way back when he was rising from the underdog status he loves to brag about defying. Mate, all successful artists were underdogs once. Yes, you made it. Yes, it was against the odds. It always is. No Friends In The Industry, as one of the song titles has it, on an album cluttered with a host of feature spots. Even Drake’s beefs taste like tofu.
There isn’t a new idea within earshot on here and the better old ideas are lifted from elsewhere, such as the occasional warmed-over Kanye-style soul/gospel backing track. What about themes? Well, there’s fatherhood, about which Drake manages to sound as sluggish and self-absorbed as he does everything else. The one affecting moment, a soulful little piano-vocal sketch titled Yebba’s Heartbreak, he has no part in. Good of him to include it, given how it shows him up. To echo the third-rate wordplay of which he’s inordinately proud, Drizzy’s new one is pure drizzle, a wet weekend of an album, soggy and seemingly endless.