Scorpion

This is a revealing, thrilling album by an artist who took a very particular experience and used it to create a beautiful project.

The album is a hulking catalog of Drake in his comfort zone, a space in which his ability to create memorable music that sits perfectly in the cradle of the cultural zeitgeist is unmatched. Still, the excessive 25-song tracklist is a misstep.

Yet for all its tiresome megalomania, Scorpion is so beautifully rendered--from vocals to samples to features to beats--that Drake ends up pulling you over to his side, much like Kanye West did on his similarly vexing “Ye.”

Side A is mostly introspective threats, neurotic boasting and paranoia about enemies. Side B is the same but with a focus on women and his love life. As with most of his releases, it works perfectly--but for 25 tracks to work is undeniably impressive.

Drake aims to come out stronger, more focused and more righteous than ever. ... He goes hard at addressing his industry ops on Side A, and it's full of the effortlessly cut-throat Drake we've come to love. ... Drake gets all the way into his feelings on the second half of Scorpion.

The 12 track Volume 1 of Scorpion is a sharply focused hip-hop album, with Drake delivering eloquent zingers over stripped back beats and spine-tinglingly atmospheric hooks. ... Meanwhile, the 13 track Volume 2 showcases Drake’s flip side, sensitive R'n'B loverman whose simple two-note melodies offer nights of pleasure on dance floors and in bedrooms yet somehow always end with broken hearts (usually his).

Scorpion solidifies his universal relatability while yet again supplying fans with an overload of tracks to willingly keep or ditch.

Scorpion might not be Drake’s most innovative work, but it does help to cement 40’s status as one of the best, and most consistent, producers of our generation, and sees Drake breaking ground commercially if not creatively.

Either Side A or Side B would function better as an album than Scorpion in its current form. Taken separately, each is a fully-functioning statement, concise and muscular, executing clear, differing visions: Side A the sharp-tongued, South-indebted rap album, while Side B is the narcotized bed for the first Drake project in years to prize singing over rapping.

It's not his greatest work but it's easily one of his most ambitious, which still makes it an album worth celebrating and listening to, though perhaps in smaller doses than an hour and a half at a time.

Scorpion is something safer and less ambitious, largely a reprocessing of old Drake ideas and moods. It is the first Drake album that’s not a definitive stylistic breakthrough, not a world-tour victory lap, not an embrace of new grievances. It is, largely, a reminder of Drakes past, and perhaps also an attempt at maintaining stability in the face of profound emotional disruption.

It’s remarkable how many of Scorpion’s 90 minutes are musically engaging. But the kind of juvenile navel-gazing that leads someone to write a line like, “She say do you love me, I tell her only partly/I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry” is less compelling when it’s coming from a 31-year-old father than a would-be college kid trying to make a name for himself.

It’s a drag, but a compulsively listenable one, with velvety production and Drake’s typically elegant taste in guest voices.

The Southern-fried flows on “Nonstop” and “Mob Ties” may raise eyebrows, but they also show off Drake’s versatility; “Summer Games” and “In My Feelings” cast Drake’s signature nocturnal musings over interesting new textures; and Jay-Z and Ty Dolla $ign both bring welcome energy to their guest slots. But it’s hard to listen through the entire expanse without performing a backseat edit, and even after several spins, too much of the album remains an indistinguishable muddle.

It’s not that Scorpion is bad music - it’s exactly what you’d expect, and too much of it. Its maximalism offers plenty for the converted (and the charts), after all, this far in, nothing is going to turn those set against him. For those of us with more complicated relationships with Drake’s music, there’s also nothing here to overwhelm the sense of stagnation dominant since Views.

The star’s hubris is no more apparent than in its sheer breadth and lack of quality control. At 25 tracks in total, Scorpion is way too long--even by Drake’s own standards--and simply doesn’t need to be.

Scorpion is stronger when Drake stops narrating the circumstances of his own life and simply writes more of the breezy, cocksure songs that seem to come so effortlessly to him.

You can understand Drake’s desire to make a grandiose statement that covers every musical base from trap to the 90s R&B slow jam of After Dark, but the problem with Scorpion is that there isn’t quite enough strong material here to support its gargantuan running time. ... It’s infuriating because Scorpion is frequently fantastic.

Oddly erratic. ... The way he darts between different sounds is exhausting and, ultimately, messy. On certain tracks he raps like he has something to prove, on others it's like he has nothing.

Although it picks up a little towards the end, Scorpion‘s second half is often a joyless slog, a prioritizing of vibe over structure that results in some of Drake’s most unfocused songwriting to date.

Unsurprisingly, his charm has worn thin. What’s left without it is a body of work that is self-indulgent, largely evasive, and frankly boring when the beat is not quite strong enough to steady the ship.

His flow has gotten really same-y over the years: “Sandra’s Rose” occasionally recalls “Weston Road Flows” and the following “Talk Up” brings “Gyalchester” to mind. It’s also weird that the R&B disc comes with so little hooks, something we used to be able to count on Drake for. It doesn’t help that Drake really likes his minimalistic beats.

Expecting consistency from an album like this is a mug’s game. There are good tracks here, about 35 minutes’ worth.

Scorpion doesn't even come close to being one of his best; instead, it's a one-trick record stretched out into 25 endless tracks by an artist who's so deep into the self-obsessed, self-pitying rut he created for himself that he can't see daylight anymore.