After his latest album’s average reception, Drake attempts to redeem the project with a sliver of potential on a new deluxe edition.
The Canadian rapper extended the tracklist of his recent LP For All The Dogs with the release of the deluxe Scary Hours Edition on Nov. 17. Being a largely anticipated release, For All The Dogs received a lukewarm response from critics and fans. With a tedious runtime over 80 minutes, the album stands apart from his releases last year being twice their length. For All The Dogs still sports all the insufferably juvenile ramblings that have come to be expected of one of music’s most popular names.
With an extensive runtime traversing 23 songs, a deluxe release of an already poorly received album is about the last thing one would expect. Yet for better or worse the rapper subverts the expectations of most artists by attempting to round off the album with six deluxe tracks.
After clawing through Drake’s disimpassioned delivery and shallow references, there are some positives to be found in the Scary Hours tracks.
The production is consistently polished for starters. Even if it can be repetitive and numb, its cleanliness still makes for easy listening.
There’s an aesthetic consistency to the production too, cultivating a reliably laid-back mood. Notwithstanding Drake’s frequent rants and references to non-existent beef, the instrumentals themselves can be pleasant at least.
However, there’s still all the problems of this deluxe release to get to.
Drake has a habit of referencing pop culture within his lyrics, a technique that may earn listeners a chuckle for their out-of-pocket delivery, but greatly disrupts the flow of tracks. The Scary Hours tracks are saturated with these references; anything between popular musicians and internet slang is up for grabs. It’s perfectly alright for an artist to playfully reference pop culture, but Drake seems to set up every verse to feature one. It’s a consistent strategy in his work that sacrifices the clarity of lyrical nuance.
The worst of the tracks in Scary Hours is far and away “The Shoe Fits,” where Drake delivers a misogynistic rant over an abysmal six minutes. Instead of resting on his colossal mainstream success, Drake feels the need to create imaginary beef and target an entire verse at “the super triggered women talkin’ down on [him].” After saying they should “drink some water [and] act like [they] somebody’s daughter,” he goes on to make subtle jabs at how they should take care of their hypothetical children instead of trying to “get a tan from [their] phone light.”
Above all, the instrumental is boring and the beat sounds repetitively stale even by Drake standards. Despite the rather targeted lyrics, Drake sounds disimpassioned and half-asleep when delivering them.
Conversely, the second deluxe track “Stories About My Brother” offers a more genuine and interesting narrative. In collaboration with producer Conductor Williams, the track balances the bravado of Drake’s own career with stories about men close to him whom he denotes as “brothers.” In spite of the exhausting faults in Drake’s recent music, it’s admirable to see him hold people of value close to his heart.
Looking at For All The Dogs alongside its recent predecessors reveals a clear pattern of behaviour. Having climbed many steps to success, Drake seems to believe he is immune to criticism. No matter how many times people outside his loyal fanbase call him out, he will continuously shift blame and victimize himself. If his new music is critiqued for being lazy and repetitive, Drake’s lyrical rants express that it seems to be the fault of everyone but himself.
Despite the mess of an album that is For All The Dogs, the Scary Hours Edition does offer up a faint reminder that Drake has potential to commit himself to solid future projects. While the beats and his flow frequently sound bland to the ear, the smooth quality of Scary Hours suggests room for artistic reinvention. In the end, choosing to evolve artistically must come from within, and Drake’s resistance to criticism makes the thought of improvement hard to believe.
