When an artist releases an album titled "rEVOLVEr," with extra emphasis placed on "evolve," one would expect a certain level of maturity and change. When that artist is T-Pain, however, you can bet that will be tossed aside in favor of a dance track and repetitive verses that remind everyone how rich he is. T-Pain gives his haters plenty of new material with an album that delivers more of the same trend-chasing, cheap club-playing songs that have made his over-inflated ego what it is today.
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"rEVOLVEr" is loaded with 14 songs that all boast immense potential for radio popularity. Give T-Pain this: He demonstrates surprising skill at producing commercially appealing tracks. But the praise ends there. The album opens with "Bang Bang Pow Pow," a schizophrenic mix of orchestra instrumentals, gunshot sounds and incoherent lyrics that are angry and defensive for no intelligible reason. Lil Wayne's verse is the only redeemable aspect of the song. "Bottlez" is more an advertisement for different brands of alcohol than it is a legitimate song. Other songs like "Sho-Time (Pleasure Thang)," "I Don't Give a Fuk" and "Default Picture" show that T-Pain certainly hasn't evolved past his disrespectful demeanor toward women, nor his audacious and lavish lifestyle.
"Drowning Again" is the only song on the album that seems to make an effort to be taken seriously, using the exhausted cliché of drowning in an ocean to express the artist's broken heart. But it's hard to find any genuine heart in this song when it is surrounded by tracks that employ the same sleazy themes T-Pain is known for.
Rather than take this opportunity to develop into a mature hip-hop artist, T-Pain produces yet another album of crowd-pleasing noise for mindless bodies to enjoy while they gyrate away in dark, pulsing dance clubs — which would be fine, if he didn't sound so desperate. Artists like Jay-Z, Kanye West and Lil Wayne have proven that there can still be sophistication within a genre riddled with manufactured stars, but this album demonstrates how far T-Pain has to go if he ever wants to earn prestige as a musician instead of just rapping about it.
Despite a noticeable lack of substance, "rEVOLVEr" is sure to get a lot of play on stations due to the absence of thought-provoking material and abundance of mass-appeal tracks.
Unless you want to be pelted with verses that use repetition of monosyllabic words as a rhyming device, leave your radio off and stay away from MTV. I believe it'll be a while before these songs will fade away. But once they do, I can't imagine they will ever be thought of again.
