The first three songs are adequate enough. If nothing else, they show that Billy Joel still has a knack for songcraft after all these years. The River starts to go downhill from there. He’s swimming hard; All About Soul is backed by what sounds like a full gospel choir; but about half of this album will drift you off to sleep.
my rating : 3 of 5
1993
The way this album ends would match the way it begins if Anthony’s Song were moved (Out) from the first slot. It’s a good song, most here are, but it should go after the title theme. It’s also a story not just about a grocer named Anthony but a sergeant who moonlights as a bartender; two characters who have no business at the start of a Billy Joel album. Perhaps that’s the point. “We all have a face that we hide away… and show ourselves when everyone has gone,” the singer insists, “They’re the faces of a stranger, but we love to try them on.”
With that, the set can be taken as nothing more than imaginative fiction. Whether Billy Joel is serenading his beloved wife (Just The Way You Are) or trying to seduce a Catholic virgin (Only The Good Die Young), he’s merely playing the role of someone else. It’s a former schoolmate of Brenda and Eddie for Scenes From An Italian Restaurant. “Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies and the King and the Queen of the prom,” he explains on the rhapsodic epic before going on to flashily outline their marriage and sequential divorce.
my rating : 4 of 5
1977
Boomy beats and flashy synths conflict with the concept, which suggests a minimalist soundscape led by acoustic guitars, but this is the kind of music you’ve come to expect from Pop singer Justin Timberlake. Producers The Neptunes are back at the helm. Timbaland, who handled most of the previous “20/20” project, is reduced to just a few songs, the best of which begins the album with a Filthy funk groove.
Other standouts include Higher Higher, Montana and the album title track. Midnight Summer Jam might be just that, but winter comes quick on Flannel, which vibes like a Christmas hymn. The album could do (better) without pretentious interludes from wife Jessica Biel and real-life clips of the couple playing with their Young Man are more annoying than cute, but the set is decidely decent on the whole.
my rating : 3 of 5
2018
This Disney adaption of The BFG, a 1982 children’s book by Roald Dahl, might have been big fun if director Steven Spielberg had taken more liberties with the plot. The first few minutes, in which a giant old man snatches a little orphan girl in the dead of night, are somewhat intriguing, but the story doesn’t really go anywhere interesting from there. The dream catching bit is silly and the Giant’s bombastic lingo is annoying, though scenes in which he hides her from Giant Country villains offer playful suspense.
my rating : 3 of 5
2016
The most interesting character here is an Army-Navy store owner who also happens to be a sexist racist neo-Nazi. “I’m your friend”, he says to the movie’s actual bad guy, but Bill Foster doesn’t want a friend. He just wants to go home to his wife and kid. The problem is that he’s divorced and the wife has a restraining order against him. He was an abusive husband, she suggests to police, and a nut. His breaking point comes when he gets stuck in a traffic jam one hot day.
From there, the former Notec worker abandons his car and goes on a one-man rampage on his way back “home”. The violent outbursts he lets loose when confronted with even the most minor of annoyances from the people he encounters along the way; his rage is often laced with socio-political rants; serve as an action-packed plot device. It’s the overall believability factor; some of the things he and other characters say or do are over the top; that goes against it.
my rating : 3 of 5
1993
Framed, a song about murdering females, which the idiots of PC America apparently consider more morally acceptable than “raping” them; that word is edited out; sounds like an outtake from Relapse. That’s a good thing. Eminem continues to subtly bash that album; here he pokes fun at the accents he used; but it’s one of his best. It may have even become my favorite. I’d have to go back and compare it to The Slim Shady LP to decide. The Marshall Mathers LP is good too. Its sequel is one of his worst. Recovery, which was presumably released to counter the relatively mild commercial success of Relapse, is too. This new Revival, the title of which seems to mark the end of a trilogy; unless you count Infinite, which I don’t, Eminem doesn’t really have any stand-alone solo albums; is three. That means his worst albums are his newest albums.
One reason for that is the lack of beats by Dre. Many of the producers Eminem recruits these days are star-shaped cookie cutters. Another reason is Eminem’s reliance on bland hooks by Autotuned pop singers who, before 2010, would’ve sounded laughably out of place on an Eminem album. This one begins with Beyoncé crooning a tuneless chorus composed by Skylar Grey, who, as far as her Eminem contributions are concerned, is a talentless bore. The biggest problem with Revival though is that it seems Em no longer has what it takes to make a good album. He can barely write a good verse anymore. There are clever bars, but the rapper is a far cry from the concise wordsmith he introduced himself to the world as. He’s now a verbose, albeit complex, rhymer with a passion for mushy sentiments and corny punchlines.
He makes it clear from the beginning that he’s aware of the criticism he gets from fans like myself and he seems to take it to heart, but we’re all saying different things. A lot of people don’t like Relapse, think it’s cool to jump on the hate Trump bandwagon because their favorite celebrities do it and cry racism whenever the victim of police corruption, which is a serious problem in America, happens to be a black boy. So he makes the legacy-tarnishing mistake of trying to please the mixed masses. That makes for an album with no clear conceptual or musical cohesion. The start and end, the latter of which reinforces the trilogy theory by time-traveling to just before it began, make sense, but the middle may as well be a random selection of new Eminem songs. Or mostly Eminem songs. Need Me is literally a Pink song featuring Eminem.
“I’m better than I ever was,” the self-proclaimed Rap God declares, but that’s just ego. I wouldn’t be surprised if even he thinks the title of this album; arguably the worst of his worst, which still isn’t bad; is a joke. A real Revival would’ve been the aesthetic equivalent of Relapse 2. The Framed song gets it right. Despite the fact that the hook makes an awkward attempt to rhyme “entertain” with “me”, it’s a zany delight. The beat reminds me of Pigs from Cypress Hill. The Offended beat has no hard snares to speak of, but winks to Eminem for interpolating an obscure Worm Eaters reference. Is it my ears or are the vocals mixed a bit too low on some of these songs? Castle and Arose go well together though. Would it be better for his legacy if he’d died when he almost did? Probably. Should he retire like he said he would after Encore? Probably.
my rating : 3 of 5
2017
The music changes drastically near the halfway point and stays that way till the end. That, along with the wise decision to abandon the chorus; one of Eminem’s all-time worst; makes this basically two songs in one. The first, a satirical rock anthem from the perspective of a white racist cop, is an annoying mess, thanks mainly to the aforementioned hook. The second, rapped by the black victim, fares better, though listening to the beat in headphones reveal that the bassline is mixed in stereo; sonically a terrible idea.
On the concept, it’s true that police corruption is a major problem in America. I’m just not convinced it’s essentially a white on black problem as the boy Eminem plays strongly suggests. Many people, black and white, prematurely attribute the bad acts of crooked cops to racism when it happens to be white on black. That creates a scenario similar to The Boy Who Cried Wolf, which minimizes the effects of true racism. It’s okay if Eminem is just playing characters, but it sounds like he’s on some kind of white guilt trip.
my rating : 3 of 5
2017
The Freddy/Jason horror concept is silly and cliché. Jadakiss already played Damien from The Omen on the last Lox album. This set doesn’t need such gimmicks. An album of duets from two good rappers is alluring enough.
What these songs make clear is that Fabolous is better. Not by much. Jadakiss holds his own. The beats hold theirs too. The hooks though; Future’s Stand Up anthem being a stimulating exception; are kill-knife dull.
my rating : 3 of 5
2017
Eminem is only human, so he makes mistakes. A big one was putting Beyoncé on this song. Put aside her humdrum melodies. A top celebrity crooner with no real connection to Eminem representing him on a song about his own waning popularity makes little sense conceptually. Bring back the humdrum singing; the chorus sounds mawkish and out of place; and the combination makes for a record that’s ironically unimpressive.
The Stan rapper, still my favorite after all these years, reveals introspective worries about letting his fans down. “I’m doing my best to not ruin your expectations,” he writes with a pencil and paper like it’s 1999. Somebody buy this guy a MacBook. But it’s not his verses that disappoint this time around. It’s the corny guest-reliant platform he’s presenting them on. The old (young) Eminem would’ve drowned Beyoncé in that Water.
my rating : 3 of 5
2017
Juicy Booty girls love Chris Brown. I’m thinking that probably has more to do with his physical allure than his music. The Auto-Tuned singing voice is good enough, but he lacks talent when it comes to composing melodies for it. Bonus tracks included, there are 45 songs here; more than his last three albums combined; but you’ll have a hard time finding a single catchy chorus among them.
The first four bars of Future’s rap verse, looped with some dainty singing in the background, could’ve made High End a better song, but the bragfest is a modest highlight nonetheless. Most of the album, which covers a wider theme range than its restrictive title suggests, leaves nothing more than romantic vibes and contemporary soul beats to keep the aesthetic ship in orbit.
my rating : 3 of 5
2017
This is a set of 4 new Lox songs, each including a verse from all three members, released for no apparent reason. The title is stylized as a grammatically incorrect social media hashtag. There doesn’t seem to be a (sensible) reason for that neither.
The music is what you’ve come to expect from the boys, which, after their disappointing comeback album released late last year, isn’t a good thing. The one exception is Gangsta Party featuring Derez Deshon; the one song with a decent chorus.
my rating : 3 of 5
2017
The MACA theme is an obvious reference to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan, but the word Crip, which can be read as an adjective or a verb, offers nothing in the way of clever puns or wordplay. It’s a title that doesn’t make much sense. America as a whole never gangbanged. OG Snoop apparently never stopped, at least on record. This EP makes a point of that. Why it ends with a lovey-dovey serenade to a girl beats me.
The best part of the set comes at the end of Three’s Company; a westside party starter featuring OT Genasis and Chris Brown; when the vocals finally make way for the music to bump. What a funky beat it is. Bassy beats are actually the best thing Snoop’s Crip Again EP has to offer. The rest may as well be reject tracks from his last two albums. Stealing the hook from Slick Rick’s Hey Young World for the opening title cut is especially lame.
my rating : 3 of 5
2017