Certified Lover Boy - Review

🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

Drake has been the biggest artist in the world for a long time now, whether it was selling a million copies first week with Views or his Scorpion Spotify playlist takeover. He has proven himself to be mainstay in the culture, but how much of that is because of his music?

That being said, there’s no doubt that Drake makes music that people love. The only reason I even pose the question is because there is an argument to be made that Drake’s last three albums (Views, More Life, and Scorpion) are albums made for the streaming era. 20+ song “playlists”, if you will, that focus more on throwing something at the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s for that reason that I’ve never considered Drake an “album artist”, exactly. I think Drake has 10/10 songs, but he’s struggled to put together a cohesive project that feels like a complete work.

Maybe he knows that, and that’s the reason he considers More Life and Dark Lane Demo Tapes a playlist and a mixtape, respectively.

Certified Lover Boy, however, is neither of these. It is his 6th studio album, and while the highs are high, Drake trips over his own feet again regarding filler.

Full disclosure: I am not someone who pays close attention to lyrics when listening to music. My brain is wired to listen to melody, so I’ve always been the type to like less lyrically inclined artists. Certified Lover Boy is one of the first albums I’ve listened to that made me want to listen to what the artist had to say over the strength of their production.

This is both a positive and a negative.

Drake, lyrically, is in pretty top form here. Songs like Pipe Down and 7am on Bridle Path showcase Drake’s strong penmanship. While Drake’s lyrical content isn’t exactly fresh — it relies on the same tropes that Drake has always been known for — there are moments that remind me of the reason that Drake got so popular: Instagram captions.

On Pipe Down, Drake spits “Yeah, and I would listen to the lies that you would tell all night/Angel eyes, but you've been giving me hell all night/I know the book that you would write is a tell-some, not a tell-all/Just to make sure you well off, you would sell all rights”. The thinly veiled toxicity and the wordplay all come together to create a perfect storm of “Drake-isms”. There is some sort of primal satisfaction that comes with these IG caption bars, and Certified Lover Boy is full of them.

However, for once in his career, Drake’s beat selection is lacking. Of the first 5 tracks, 4 of them are beats centered around a heavily filtered vocal sample on top of trap drums. There is little to differentiate them, and that’s what made the first half of this album a bit of a chore to get through. There are standout moments in production, like the Future and Young Thug assisted Way 2 Sexy, which, while still suffering from a filtered vocal sample backbone, has eclectic synth lines that overpower anything else. N 2 Deep’s guitar heavy first half is memorable, before dipping its toes into the watery pools of ambient trap music in the second half. While the second half has been done a thousand times over, it’s the contrast of the two styles as well as Drake’s reverb heavy vocal performance that brings the song it’s flavor.

And when the formulaic Drake “underwater vocal sample” is done well, it’s really done well. Fair Trade’s RnB sample gives the song momentum, which is only accentuated by Drake’s nonstop rapping. It even works under the beginning of Travis Scott’s song stealing contribution, in a collaboration reminiscent of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late’s Company.

Features are used heavily on Certified Lover Boy, and most of them carry the song they’re featured on. Lil Wayne refuses to take a breath on You Only Live Twice, Tems’ beautiful tonality in her voice gives Fountains a texture that Drake could not achieve on his own, and Jay-Z drops a Pound Cake-esque verse that lifts Love All from average to great.

Not all of them are winners. 21 Savage assisted and Metro Boomin’ produced Knife Talk is the most boring song on the album. Lil Baby’s verse on the puzzling Girls Want Girls is passable, but only made want to listen to the Scary Hours 2 single Wants and Needs that much more. Kid Cudi’s contribution to IMY2 wasn’t bad, but I don’t feel that it gelled with Drake’s style in a positive way.

Drake’s solo tracks are also just passable. Highlights like the incredible Race My Mind give me flashbacks to Views’ Feel No Ways, but misses like TSU or Papi’s Home sour the mood. At the end of the day, that’s the biggest issue with Certified Lover Boy. For every amazing highlight, there is a skip that brings the mood of the album down that much more. Bloat has been the name of Drake’s game for years, throwing 25 songs at listeners and praying 5 of them stick. If this album was 10 songs shorter, it would’ve been that much more impressionable. But because the tracklist begs listeners for more streams, and therefore more album sales, the integrity of the album falters.

There is an amazing Drake album tucked away in the 21 songs listeners must slog through to get to the end, and it’s this lack of self control that will keep Drake from ever achieving the status of an album artist. In the meanwhile, there’s no doubt that this project will keep Drake fans happy, and flood radio for years to come.

6/10

Favorite Songs: Race My Mind, Fair Trade, N 2 Deep

Least Favorite Songs: Papi’s Home, TSU, Knife Talk