Here, he’s juggling lust, love, pride, arrogance, depression, affluence, and inadequacy, and getting a little lost in the shuffle. That said, Save Me’s mixed messages make the sturdier organizing concepts of Monster, DS2, FUTURE, HNDRXX, Beast Mode, and Honest - album-length dives into a specific quadrant of the rapper’s creativity - feel like the most efficient method of packaging new Future music. Lucia” next to the desperate “Please Tell Me” is a not-so-subtle suggestion that men don’t really know what the hell they want.
#FUTURE THE WIZRD REVIEW FULL#
The Genius annotations for Save Me are full of producer notes about quirks the rapper was encouraged to leave in.) At its best, Save Me is an intriguing expression of knotty realities. (Last year’s airtight Zaytoven team-up Beast Mode 2 sifted through dozens of records to get to the nine that made the final cut. Consistency is Future’s superpower, but he needs to be challenged and edited.
“Xanax Damage” is quick and catchy, as is “Please Tell Me,” in spite of the feeling that the rapper is cannibalizing tics and ideas from his back catalogue. “Government Official” revives the harsh raps of FUTURE “Shotgun” and “Extra” return to HNDRXX’s hunger for love. The best songs express the tug-of-war at the root of the rapper’s writing, the balance between his rapping and his singing, and between his dueling desires to be loved and envied. It’s just a little drunk on its own drama. He can commute these feelings without the bells and whistles. S ave Me carries its sad-sack tendencies a step further than the great dejected Future songs have in the past, but making this record sound like a downer taking hold ultimately obscures the natural expressiveness of the singer’s voice. The most unnerving quality about Monster’s brokenhearted hate-fuck anthem “Throw Away” is clarity. You feel the love in “Blood, Sweat, Tears” and “Lie to Me” in the determination to send the hook into the stratosphere. The most moving Future songs don’t use a coat of effects to get the point across.
“Love Thy Enemies” ignores meter as the rapper croons sluggishly out of time, stopping the verse halfway through on a cough, as if the source of truth in Future’s music is how broken his voice can be made to sound, rather than how he manages to succeed in the face of his demons.Ĭoating Future in effects to make him sound defeated on sad songs is the same kind of miscalculation A$AP Rocky made with Testing, an album that wore its druggie bona fides in the mix more so than in the writing. “Please Tell Me” distracts from the main vocal with a few too many ad-libs, while Future slurs his way through verses and choruses, the way a young buck like Playboi Carti might. Lucia” lays the vocal manipulation on too thickly. It is, by turns, both a little undercooked and a little overwrought. Save Me, his new EP and second project in five months, is one of these. The feeling that he’s pulling songs fully formed out of thin air becomes a wish that he’d rein it in and release less music. What seems like an effortless knack for sharp hooks and lines suddenly feels labored. You know the one too many when you hear it.
Photo: David Wolff-Patrick/Redferns/Getty Imagesįuture’s prolificacy is a gift and a curse.