Overview: Easy Mac with the cheesy raps comes through.
Mac Miller is a rapper from Pittsburgh who gained a lot of buzz through various mixtapes and his huge single "Donald Trump". This is his second album following 2011's Blue Slide Park. I've never been a big fan of Miller, I like some of the features he's done, his XXL cyhper verse was pretty crazy and I had yet to find a song of his that really captured that energy. I do enjoy "Donald Trump" and "Frick Park Market" for what they are but outside of that I'm not a fan of Miller.
The Positive: By far, the opening track is one of the best songs he's ever written. It's introspective, deep and rather lyrical. "I'm Not Real" which features Odd Future member Earl Sweatshirt is a great track as well. "Bird Call" is produced by Clams Casino who usually produces spacey, getting high beats as clearly evident in the 5 tracks he produced on A$AP Rocky's Live. Love. A$AP but on this he produces a banger in which Mac sounds so comfortable over. His flow sounds a lot better on this album over every other Mac song I've heard. A complaint he receives a lot is that he's boring with a monotone voice, while that's not entirely false he stays mostly fresh on this album and strays from being too boring aside from a few songs. The production and beats on this are pretty solid featuring Mac Miller, Pharrell Williams, Earl Sweatshirt, Clams Casino, Flying Lotus, The Alchemist and Chuck Inglish among a few others. The all together make the album sound cohesive and not just a collection of tracks.
The Negative: Some of these tracks are rather boring and just not good. Unsurprisingly all of the tracks I don't like have no features, just Mac on them. "Avian", "S.D.S', "I Am Who I Am (Killin' Time)", "REMember", "Youforia" and "Claymation" are these tracks. They're boring and unimaginative. Luckily for him, there's 19 tracks(including deluxe edition" so these negatives don't drop the rating too much.
The Features: One of the biggest reasons I checked this out was because of the features on it. Ab-Soul shows up on "Matches" and tears his verse to absolute pieces. Action Bronson appears on a 6-minute track that you wouldn't think would work but somehow it does. ScHoolboy Q and Jay Electronica kill their verses on "Gees" and "Suplexes Inside of Complexes and Duplexes", respectively. Finally Tyler, The Creator shows up on the deluxe edition on the track "O.K." and just comes through with a classic Tyler verse that's just great. Unfortunately for Mac his features outshine him. He did his homework and got some underground guys with buzz and brought them on and they brought their A-games. I think the biggest thing is the change in voice from Mac to anything else.
Overall: Not a bad album by any means, I don't know how much I'll be returning to it though. The features really came in and did their thing and probably saved this project from being abysmal. There's guys that can carry an album by themselves and Mac Miller is not one of them.
Number of Tracks Kept: 13/19
Rating: 6.5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment