I wake up feeling like you won’t play right
I used to know, but now that **** don’t feel right.
With Awaken, My Love, Donald Glover’s musical alter ego has gone in some interesting and compelling new directions. This album, essentially, is taken up with the music of the seventies, from the fuzzy psychedelia to the stone cold funk, Glover neatly ticks all the boxes. Or perhaps I should say that he sloppily ticks the boxes and this statement basically encapsulates the strengths and the flaws of the album. First of all, the album does have the feel of a somewhat academic experiment; Glover hits all of the genre mainstays so purposely that there’s something a bit mechanical about it, a little too studied. However, there is a raucous quality to some of the songs here, a blurry sloppiness that’s pure Glover. It gives some of the songs a rawness that overcomes the soullessness that sinks a lot of the others. Love it or hate it, Glover is trying new things and this is an album worth admiration more than it’s worth love. The album certainly works very well at some points; the menacing Boogieman, the hypnotic Redbone, the deeply emotional one-two punch of Baby Boy & Stand Tall. On other songs, things fall apart in disappointing ways. The album opens with an annoying burst of formless sound being sold as a song, the groove and sentiment of Have Some Love are both completely soulless and the vocal decisions being made on California & Zombies will have you scratching your head. Glover certainly has talent and it’s undeniable that he’s stretching in new directions. He’s crafted an album that is challenging & complex; in a musical landscape dominated by formulas, “challenging & complex” is often mistaken for greatness. But it would be a mistake to call Awaken, My Love a great album; for all its ambitions, it’s unsatisfying too much of the time. But maybe this road will eventually yield rewards for Glover; or, more likely, he’ll leave this road to stretch in some new way with his next record. For now, we have Awaken, My Love, an album worth hearing, an album worth a certain amount of respect. From Glover, we often expect more; but we’ll make do. 3 stars.
tl;dr – messy, complex album is often disappointing, soulless and mediocre, but it serves as an interesting stretch for Glover and it’s worth being disappointed over. 3 stars.