SO, Calvin's latest LP is here, and this one as expected is an obvious step away from his last couple of albums, harping back to his older disco sound from the 2000s. To no surprise, this album is less of an "album" and more of a collection of songs which obviously are targeting the summer crowd.
Speaking of summer crowd though, there's one thing that's clearly missing from the album. There aren't any obvious smash summer hits. It doesn't feel like Calvin is trying to make another "18 months" despite the crazy number of notable artists on here, and he's taking a step away from the "been there done that". On one hand, that's something that some could argue is respectable, but on the other hand, it feels like there IS something missing. On previous Calvin records, despite maybe not liking his albums in their entirety, I would have several songs on repeat for a long time. I don't see myself doing that with this album, and there's a couple of reasons why.
The first and foremost reason is that there are so many features on this album that it feels like most of them don't get to shine. Calvin brings on some incredible singers like Ariana Grande, John Legend, Frank Ocean, Katy Perry, all of which seem to take a back seat for their performances. For example, in "Heatstroke" with Ariana, all you get is her singing one line essentially, which I find holds back a tremendous amount of potential that could have been brought to this song. Even in songs where a singer will get a fair amount of opportunity to present themselves, they lack that delivery. Pharrell on "Feels" just feels like he's singing a song from a cheesy Ace Ventura film. That's the problem with these features, none of these songs make me want to listen to them over the original artists' content. I'd rather just go and listen to each of these artists' music independently.
Which on that note, there's a reason why a lot of these artists had so little spotlight. Because the rappers took such a prominent spot in most of these songs. I'm just gonna say it - all of the rapping on this album ranges from mediocre to bad. I dunno, maybe some people like this kind of rapping, but I absolutely cannot stand it on this album, with autotune not helping in several cases. I'm not a fan of most of the rappers in the first place, but even the ones that do stand out for me don't do a particularly good or memorable job here.
Anyway, what I WOULD have liked more of on this album was actually in the last two songs, "Faking It" and 'Hard to Love". Not entirely that in style, I mean in the sense of "less is more". Feature less artists and give each artist in the songs more spotlight, he did that really well on previous records, and I understand he wasn't trying to do the same thing, but that aspect of it worked for a reason. All this being said, if you can look past the vocal performances, if you enjoy this style of rapping, there is something to be said about this album. There is some really fantastic production going on. It's clear that Calvin put a lot of love and care into what he did here, so if this is your thing, there's a lot to be appreciated here. Overall though, this album was not for me.