Review: Drake — Views (2016)
★★★☆☆
Music — Views is just filled with songs you’d love to mouth to a someone on a long car ride filled with bass and tension. Drizzy comes across as honest and vulnerable and as always says things most people would find too corny or straight-forward. But that means you can sing something corny without too much shame.
Run your mouth, I’d rather listen to someone else, I gave your nickname to someone else, I know you’re seein’ someone that loves you, And I don’t want you to see no one else, I don’t want you here with no one else, I don’t wanna do this with no one else
- Track 7: Redemption
At the same time that has started to become almost like a trope for Drake as an artist. Following the success of Hotline Bling, which laments the loss of an old lover, every other song with a similar theme feels bored and makes Views feel unnecessarily restless. Keep The Family Close is an interesting track, with a breakout Broadway-like beat, but it’s dogged by this been-there-done-that lyrical form. Same with U With Me?.
This still works when the production is top notch, but Drake certainly doesn’t maintain a decent level of attention over the course of the 80 minute release. And if anything there’s almost a sense of relief that radiates whenever another artist drops by with a few lines, or in other cases almost a whole song. Like, thank God Drake is taking a break from sad bars. It’s like listening to a really poppy album all the way through, it’s almost too much. Drizzy, as always, still has some great lines. But Views has two separate conclusions for me.
One – it once again makes me think that maybe Drake is just a great single artist. I mean, the Photoshop on the cover of Views is enough proof that he doesn’t even take this album that seriously.
But more important, number two – Drake is another artist just asking for reinvention. He can either do something new or he’ll start to come down the other side of the Top 40 mountain. And for an artist at his peak, Views feels like a slight decline sadly. Even so, I still ended up listening to Redemption’s second verse about a hundred times this morning. It’ll probably keep me up tonight.
Music is weird.
