Album review: Drake, 'Thank Me Later'
3 stars (out of 4)
The most heavily touted and highly anticipated hip-hop debut of 2010 is here, but it doesn’t exactly seize its moment.
Fame seemed preordained for Drake with Lil Wayne’s tutelage, countless cameos on other artists’ singles and a well-received 2009 EP and mix tape -- which might be why the 23-year-old, Toronto-born Aubrey Drake Graham sounds almost skittish on “Thank Me Later” (Cash Money). In a genre that demands boldness and bravado, Drake turns his first full-length release into an inward-looking, slow-moving, psychedelic psychodrama. If not the expected commercial juggernaut, “Thank Me Later” is personal and eccentric, the journal of a flawed, self-doubting regular guy rather than a strutting icon-in-waiting.
So Drake isn’t the hip-hop savior he was hyped to be. Instead, as he drifts through what should have been his boisterous coming-out party, he comes off as muted and rueful, missing the days when he was 19 and it was just about him and his girlfriend in a college dorm room.
The most heavily touted and highly anticipated hip-hop debut of 2010 is here, but it doesn’t exactly seize its moment.
Fame seemed preordained for Drake with Lil Wayne’s tutelage, countless cameos on other artists’ singles and a well-received 2009 EP and mix tape -- which might be why the 23-year-old, Toronto-born Aubrey Drake Graham sounds almost skittish on “Thank Me Later” (Cash Money). In a genre that demands boldness and bravado, Drake turns his first full-length release into an inward-looking, slow-moving, psychedelic psychodrama. If not the expected commercial juggernaut, “Thank Me Later” is personal and eccentric, the journal of a flawed, self-doubting regular guy rather than a strutting icon-in-waiting.
So Drake isn’t the hip-hop savior he was hyped to be. Instead, as he drifts through what should have been his boisterous coming-out party, he comes off as muted and rueful, missing the days when he was 19 and it was just about him and his girlfriend in a college dorm room.