- Record Label: Cash Money
- Release Date: Sep 20, 2015
- Critic score
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- By date
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Sep 24, 2015In the end, What a Time reminds us that music is best when it’s enjoyed when in the company of others. It’s a project that demands that the listener live vicariously through it and looks to give hope through music to those willing to listen. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Oct 12, 2015Future’s eerily Auto-Tuned sing-song vocal style, suspended somewhere between Lil Wayne’s salacious croak and the spiritual suspended animation of a Gregorian chant, seems to energise him.... Drake is sounding as dynamic and engaged as at any time since 2009’s stellar So Far Gone.
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Oct 7, 2015For those looking for eleven quality hip-hop tracks from two of the craft’s best, What a Time to Be Alive is truer than not.
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Sep 23, 2015The project gives fans an answer to the hypothetical of what a full album between Drake and Future would sound like, right now, in 2015. It’s cutting and honest and self-congratulatory and vindictive. It’s fantastically decadent and brutally real at the same time.
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Sep 22, 2015What A Time To Be Alive often sounds more like a Drake album than the jazzier, busier records that Future usually creates. Yet the Atlanta rapper dominates the record, demonstrating his impressive adaptability.
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Sep 25, 2015For now, What a Time is the sound of two of our biggest current pop figures using each other’s strengths to bring out their own.
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Oct 20, 2015Although it fails to live up to the internet created hype, its highs outweigh its lows making it an impressive body of work especially if it was made in just six days.
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Oct 7, 2015What a Time to Be Alive is also a worthy hang session from MCs Drake and Future, one that feels instant, spontaneous, and just messy enough to keep off the top shelf.
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Sep 24, 2015It's a quickie and it sounds that way: a six-day digital dash in the studio. Yet that's why it feels fresh and spontaneous.
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Sep 23, 2015The point is to not look at What a Time to Be Alive as any sort of triumph of ambition and music, but rather as a solid assortment of irresistable bangers from two artists for whom that shit comes easy. It's not the accomplishment, it's the victory lap.
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Sep 23, 2015WATTBA still measures slightly disappointing in terms of what we've seen and heard from each artist individually, even this year. What A Time To Be Alive, even as a concept centers itself around the idea of 'now,' instead of striving for the notion of 'classic.' So I'll enjoy it for the time being.
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Sep 23, 2015Even with Drake’s lazy punchlines, though, both he and Future are still great rap artists in their primes, and sometimes they figure things out just based on sheer talent. What the tape lacks in congruence, it makes up for in glimmering Metro Boomin production.
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Sep 22, 2015What a Time to Be Alive is not the best album of 2015, but it is the album that best defines 2015 so far.
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Sep 22, 2015Despite a corny bar here or there, Drake sounds way more energized with much better flows. But he’s still on Future’s planet.
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Sep 22, 2015Though not the blow away success that meets the considerable hype surrounding its debut, What A Time To Be Alive certainly features 2015’s top-selling rap superstar duo turning up and having a helluva lot of fun.
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Sep 23, 2015What A Time To Be Alive is ultimately the kind of release that will be relegated to curio status in the near future. It doesn’t hold a candle to the strength of either rappers best work, and for Future in particular its overall quality feels like a steep dip from the highs of his most recent run.
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Sep 22, 2015This is a decent mixtape that you'll happily spin for up to a fortnight, I reckon. But it's a hook. It's a sample to get you addicted.
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Q MagazineOct 27, 2015This feels like a flying visit through an impromptu victory party. [Dec 2015, p.107]
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Sep 25, 2015While this project will likely infiltrate the Serato of many a nightclub DJ, there's little--outside the three or four cohesive, codeine-fuelled joints surprisingly carried mostly by Future--that reaches the potential of what What a Time to Be Alive could have been.
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Sep 24, 2015The whole set comes off like a collection of Future songs--with some Drake verses clumsily tacked on as an afterthought.
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Sep 22, 2015When Drake swoops in to pick up the thread, his clear, articulated voice is so much more animated than Future’s that the impact is jarring.... Occasionally the two conjure interesting spaces between underground murk and pop-star sheen (Live From The Gutter, Scholarships), and the tension, as they adapt to each other, is compelling.
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Sep 22, 2015The chemistry works as expected, even if it never exceeds, or even reaches, the sum of its artists. There's no transcendent moment here, because the project is essentially a meeting of opposites who mostly stay in their lanes.
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Sep 22, 2015For the most part, What a Time to Be Alive is a layup from two of hip-hop’s most innovative rappers, not a hasty record, but not an intricate one either, more like a series of energetic first drafts, with choruses often little more than the same phrase repeated ad nauseam.
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Sep 22, 2015There’s very little evidence here that makes the case for either as the game-changing superstar he actually is. Future comes off particularly blasé, falling repeatedly into the cliché version of himself that is all mealy-mouthed strip-club crooning.... Drake sounds only slightly more engaged.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 76 out of 120
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Mixed: 20 out of 120
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Negative: 24 out of 120
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Sep 24, 2015
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Sep 26, 2015This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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Sep 22, 2015