“Awaken My Love” rises beyond much of Gambino’s past works at times, and the closing track, “Stand Tall” features his refreshingly unedited voice and a beautiful choir working together on an understated and laid back beat, providing a remarkably peaceful and natural ending to Gambino’s messy, chaotic, and stressful project. Gambino’s traditional beachy lightness is present at times on the album, layering ukulele over melancholic electric guitar and a choir in “The Night Me and Your Mama Met.” Gambino creates this vibe instrumentally in “California” with judicious use of bongo drums, maracas, and güiros, but deprives the song of any pleasant airiness with urgent vocals that feel somehow compressed. This lack of lyrical value leaves the album feeling empty, devoid of what helped Childish Gambino carve his niche in the rap industry. In Camp (2011) and Because the Internet (2013), Gambino showed himself to be a highly gifted lyricist, mixing social commentary, ballads, and braggadocio through puns, alliteration, and unflinching willingness to defy traditional rap norms. This shifts the focus onto the instrumentals, which proves to be a wildly mixed bag. While most of the songs are more than three minutes long, they all have repetitive, distorted choruses occasionally punctuated by single-stanza verses. Throughout the song, Gambino dramatically distorts his voice, making the song feel more fit for an ill-conceived Halloween album than awards-season release.Ī noticeable feature of the album is an unexpected lack of lyrics. Gambino’s use of auto-tune in the song is one of the least necessary and poorly executed instances of auto-tune I have heard. “Zombies” is almost a complete mirror image of “Boogieman,” with entertaining funk instrumentals that are bogged down by grating vocals and uninspired lyrics. Gambino’s approach to these ideas through an extended metaphor is refreshing and interesting, but instrumentally the song is jarring, confusing, and hard to listen to. “Boogieman” addresses themes of police bias and brutality, both highly relevant themes that musicians like Kendrick Lamar, A Tribe Called Quest, and Beyoncé have confronted. Where the singles took the best parts of these things and brought them to exciting and compelling new heights, much of the album paired them with messy production, indecipherable vocals, and mystifying songwriting to draw these ideas to unexpected lows. The album is experimental, funk and R&B inspired, and entirely devoid of rapping. Gambino keeps a lot of what built up the initial excitement for the singles. These expectations changed drastically through the album’s 49 minutes. The anticipation for the album was fervent, and expectations were high. Both of these songs are catchy, inventive, and retro departures for Gambino, and seemed to signal a sea change in the musician’s style for his upcoming album. Gambino’s voice is distorted beyond recognition, to a falsetto reminiscent of Prince, that bounces over compelling funk instrumentals. The second song, “Redbone,” was released in a similar way and garnered similar excitement. “Me and Your Mama” is unlike anything Childish has released, featuring a full choir, a mixture of synths and full-fledged electric guitar, and a conspicuous lack of rapping by the famously articulate and clever emcee. The first single from Childish Gambino’s latest album “Awaken, My Love!” was released with little fanfare: a Youtube video of an eerie, gleeful, blue face, accompanied by a song entitled “Me and Your Mama.” However, the buzz around the song immediately snowballed beyond its understated release.
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