Quick Hits, Vol. 165 (Eminem, Taylor Swift, Chris Stapleton, Greenleaf)

Eminem - Revival.  Ah man.  That is really too bad.  From the first moment, with the Beyonce-assisted "Walk on Water," this album is just a disappointment.  Do you remember what was awesome about Eminem back in the day?  Ridiculously excellent wordplay and storytelling over and through fun beats.  Most of the beats on here are extremely simplistic.  Hell "Walk on Water" never even gets a beat.  It just uses piano chords and Eminem spewing some whiny lines about himself and the difficulty of fame that fall flat because there's no beat to match them to or save them from sounding random and rambling.  
And since that is the first track on the album, it sets the tone, now all of these tunes sound skeletal and rambling.  Did you hear his freestyle thing that he did to diss Trump a few months ago?  That is what a lot of this feels like, just him going stream of consciousness without worrying about connecting any of the lyrics into a cohesive story or organizing them around a beat.  With random pausing and disconnected thoughts.  Like "Offended," where he uses a super basic horn sample (with some other little sounds) that eases into the ghost of a beat, but then gets a complete hard stop for a weird sing-song chorus based on the silly song about "nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I'm gonna go eat some worms."  Then that chorus stops and the "beat" comes back.  It's just half-baked.  Why can't there be a real beat here that carries throughout the track?  Its garbage.
"Walk on Water" already has 50 million streams, but almost all of the rest of the album (which was, to be fair, only released to streaming last Friday) is under 200k streams.  The second most popular one (because that top track is hot garbage) is called "Untouchable," with 4.6 million streams.

That is way better - it is like he knows there is a beat there for him to rap along with.  So much better than the non-existent beat rambling.  This sounds kind of like that new Ice Cube track about Good Cop Bad Cop...  And it is talking about something important and digging into police brutality on African Americans.  This is a dense ass song, and I'm sure someone is going to complain that Em shouldn't be rapping from the perspective of a black man, but I appreciate him for trying to jump into there and bring it up.
Another thing on this album, he goes the gigantic star guests route, with Queen Bey, Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys, P!nk, and then some weird ones like the X Ambassadors (those guys with the Jeep commercial song a few years ago), Kehlani, and Skylar Grey (whose name sounds very porny to me).  Most of those are just hooks - the chorus singing.  But I loved the rapped choruses (chorusi?) from his old tunes.  I've never been all that excited about sung hooks like the Chris Brown garbage that everyone does, so these don't work well for me.
I don't know, I don't need for him to still be talking about horrible misogynistic things or murdering his mom or eating drugs, but this album just doesn't have much fun going for it.  About the only fun thing in here is when he uses cool samples like "I Love Rock and Roll" for "Remind Me" - got that Rick Rubin sound right there for sure - The Cranberries' "Zombie" in "In Your Head," "The Rose" (of all weird things) in "A Rose," or "Heat," which depends on an interpolation of some song that feels like it should be Skynyrd or no, wait, its "Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo," right?  NO, the Internet says it is from Boogie Nights, some riff that John C. Reilly plays for a song for Marky Mark.  Weird, that is a deep cut sample man.  But at least those recognizable samples are interesting?

Damn, speaking of rambling.  This review just keeps farting along...  19 songs on this album, an hour and 17 minutes long.

So, here's the deal.  I'm not going to try to say that Em can't wordsmith as good or better than anyone.  He makes lines that are so dense with rhyming words that you almost need to slow down the track to catch them all.  I love that, where he doesn't just rhyme at the end of a line, but packs the whole couplet with words that click - very cool.  But I'm very good with never hearing this album again, and honestly none of the tracks are good enough for me to hold on to them.  I'm bummed to say that.

Taylor Swift - Reputation.  Oh hey, speaking of disappointing shit!  I wrote about this somewhere else recently, but I could not have been more grateful for my middle child the other day, who voiced an opinion that this album is very disappointing and not even close to Red or 1989.  AMEN, CHILD!  The first single, "Look What You Made Me Do," is actively bad.  The beat is lame, not danceable, not memorable.  The lyrics are garbage, and that is the worst possible thing to get from Swift, who can write some legitimately excellent turns of phrase.  But instead, like most of this album, you just get trite junk that sounds like any other boring girl starlet - "In the middle of the night, in my dreams, you should see the things that we do, in the middle of the night, in my dreams, I know I'm gonna be with you, so I take my time.  Baby, let the games begin."  It's just lazy and the kind of thing I've heard a hundred times.  Now, that particular track, "...Ready For It?" has the best beat on the whole album, so it isn't all terrible, but that beat can't save the jenky lyrics.  

Ooooh, so tough!  The second track ("End Game") showcases terrible verses from Future, more garbage from TayTay, and then a poor hook from Ed Sheeran.  Hard to beat the total world domination of that trio of artists for current popularity, but it is almost like you took Lebron, Steph, and Kahwi, got everyone all excited about what they might be able to do on the basketball court, but then you asked them to play on 6 foot goals.  Some of the other tracks have beats/tracks that at least pique the interest, but lyrically they are just weak as hell.  Here, try "Gorgeous."

"You should take it as a compliment that I got drunk and made fun of the way you talk."  Uh, what?  Is this a Donald Trump song?  And then "You're so gorgeous, I can't say anything to your face, 'cause look at your face."  Man, really plumbing the depths of your writing abilities there.  Too bad Shakespeare didn't know about this wonderful trick, would have saved him a lot of extra words.  Instead of "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief. That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she," he could have just said: "Juliet is fine.  How fine?  So fine.  Yeah."  I'll stick to her older, better albums.

Chris Stapleton - Songs From a Room, Vol. 2.  I'm a lost cause when it comes to this dude.  After seeing him at ACL two years ago, I loved it, but after seeing his ACL taping at the Moody a month or so ago, I'm a drooling fanboy.  While I wish he had stuck this album together with Vol. 1 to make life even better, its still excellent on its own.  The album opener, "Millionaire," is another smooth sailing track of soulful country goodness, then the second track ("Hard Livin'") kicks in some classic outlaw country swagger.  The thing I didn't know about Stapleton until the ACL taping is how bad ass the man is on the guitar.  He must have used 38 guitars at that taping, and he just slayed the shit out of them.  I love Stapleton's ability to go from down-low, low-down blues like "Nobody's Lonely Tonight" into a drinking/stoned rock swagger track like "Tryin' to Untangle My Mind" or "Midnight Train to Memphis."  
This next video isn't the most popular track on the album (that would be Millionaire at 3.3 million streams) but it is a really sweet one.  " A Simple Song," which has just under a million streams.

The title is perfect, its just a simply plucked little tune, supporting a classic country sentiment of happiness despite things not being perfect.  I'm really enjoying this album.

Greenleaf - Rise Above the Meadow.  Swedish band, chock full of sludgy hard rock riffage and stoner rock bluster.  It is always going to be weird to me when foreign people are so able to emulate English that you would never know that they are from Sweden and normally talk like the Muppet Chef.  Because this album has been right after the new U2 and new Stapleton in my queue for the past two weeks, I've heard it many many times by now, and it actually works really well.  If you are in to the heavy rock stuff, this one is good.  By the way, their top track overall on Spotify is a tune called "Stray Bullit Woman," which makes me think I might be wrong about their ability to assimilate into the English language...  Their top tune on this album is the album opener (a bad sign), with about 155k streams for "A Million Fireflies."

Super freaky body paint lady makes the video OK, but the long sections of the guy just falling next to a building make me want to freak out.  I think I would enjoy seeing these guys rage in person.  Pretty good album, I think I'll keep it around for anger listening and lawn mowing.