While working on his new TV series, Atlanta, Glover and his longtime sidekick Ludwig Göransson seem to have had some kind of musical awakening brought on by late-'60s dipped-in-psychedelia soul and early-'70s earthy funk. His 2015 EP Kauai widened his approach a bit, with Glover doing more singing than rapping in a hazy modern R&B style, showing off a voice so smooth that it's almost unfair that one guy can have so much going for him. Over the course of a backpack's worth of mixtapes and a couple of albums that won him commercial success, if not critical acclaim, Childish Gambino (aka Donald Glover) staked a claim as one of the brainiest, weirdest, and most inventive rappers around. This album should be listened from end to end, both actively and passively, there are so many vibes and feeling you can get out of it depending on how you’re thinking about it at the time.2x12" Clear Vinyl R&B Rap Hip Hop Funk & Soul LP I consider it one of the best released this year, yet most only know it from two songs, and don’t appreciate it for what it is and can be, which genuinely upsets me a bit. However, it can be interpreted to mean that you’re alone that you have no one and nothing, and you should be terrified of something imminent.Īll in all, this album is incredible. Not necessarily a bad feeling, it could be interpreted as being lone to recoup from everything, and being terrified of going back to reality. I think it’s the use of reverb, a sort of echo effect, gives you a feeling of loneliness and solidarity. The introduction gives a real sense of tension, of what sort is unknown until later. My favourite song on this album is, by a close margin, “Terrified”. This song is very comparable to the album itself wide ranging use and experimentalism of instruments, laid back but often harsh and deep vocals, and huge variation in styles – even within the songs themselves. The introduction is very chill and quite drawn out, with its choral vocals and complex keyboard melody, while still being hard hitting with its strong drums.Then almost half way through a huge drop comes with harsh vocals and a lot of distortion put on the bass and synths.
I think this song itself is a good description of the whole album. It reached and stayed quite high on the UK YouTube trending charts for a couple weeks. It was published on YouTube several weeks before the album was released. The two went on to write this, in my opinion, masterpiece.Īnother song that was, to an extent, unavoidable was the opening song, Me and Your Mama. Redbone is an incredible song, and it started out as just a simple drum beat that Donald Glover thought of and suggested to composer and producer, Ludwig Göransson. Donald Glover even acknowledged the meme in a concert as an introduction before performing the song. It was featured in the brilliant psychological horror movie, Get Out, and has been host to one of the more popular memes this year, where the song would be remixed comedically, sometimes, at least. It’s likely that you’ve heard of the album’s headline song: Redbone. Kauai is the album most like “Awaken, My Love” in that it’s a lot less rap and more vocal and, by far, more experimental. Some of the later songs in the album, especially the interlude tracks, are a good hint to his subsequent project “Kauai”, an EP released in 2014. His 2013 album “Because the Internet” followed well despite seeming like a huge flip in style with it’s very chill hip-hop vibe.
But if you repeat it and really listen, even though this style of music isn’t new, it does bring a change to the mundane chart heavy music. You might feel deterred from his music from one listen of this album. His first, incredibly aggressive Rap and Hip-Hop album, “Camp” released in 2011, portrays well his anger and strong emotions through his music. But it’s very easy to argue that Childish Gambino isn’t your bog-standard R&B artist.ĭonald Glover has released 4 projects under his musical alter ego Childish Gambino, and each of them has been very different from each other, but if you listen to each of them in order, you can see where a lot of the ideas of his songs spawned, and then the rather strange songs on “Awaken, My Love” don’t seem so weird. Right… Awaken, My Love… Where to start?… A general umbrella opinion of this quite musically controversial album is that it’s great the album envelopes so many genres and styles and uses so many techniques that you wouldn’t expect an R&B artist to use.
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