Playboi Carti - Album Review
Tim Stephens
Playboi Carti is a quick-rising, Atlanta-born rapper breaking through with his newest album, Playboi Carti. Carti was signed to A$AP Rocky’s label Awful Records after his breakout single Broke Boi and appearing on multiple different tracks with groups such as A$AP MOB.
While Carti has become known quite quick in the hip-hop scene, he isn’t showing off anything unique with this self-titled album.
Overall, there’s not too much to talk about with this album. The only things that can be said is it is repetitive, uninspired by virtually anything, and is altogether mediocre.
Playboi Carti starts out with “Location,” which on first listen, it didn’t sound too awful. It had this cloudy, ethereal feel with the beat, until Carti himself actually entered the album.
The first thing that is even heard from Carti is the eyeroll ad libs. When you already have people like Lil Uzi Vert using ad libs that include almost exclusively Yeah and What in the background of a song, hearing from another artist makes you groan.
The main problem is Carti himself, with his odd voice. When it comes to a voice of an artist, specifically a rapper, it isn’t necessarily a bad idea to make an off the wall voice. It can make your music easy to recognize and could possibly bring in a whole different crowd of people.
One of the best examples is Danny Brown, with his trademark yelp that almost anyone that has listened to him can recognize in an instant. For many people, it’s something that has to grow on you since it’s so different, but Carti on this album just sounds effortless, and not in a good way. This is shown especially on tracks like “Magnolia” and “Yah Mean.”
The only thing that came out of this album that was positive was the production and the features. While Lil Uzi Vert doesn’t bring an immense amount to the table (especially since Carti sounds like a poor man’s version of Uzi himself), it brings some kind of charisma to the album.
The track “New Choppa (feat. A$AP ROCKY)” is probably the best song on this project, mainly because of ROCKY, who shows his usual attitude, but anything is better than Playboi Carti on this album basically.
RATING: 2.1/5