We've touched a few times in these Friday reviews the idea that there is no original music, and sometimes that's okay. Maggie Rogers wasn't doing anything that Haim hasn't already done, but that was okay, because it was still great music! Spielbergs accurately received those Japandroids and Superchunk comparisons, but that was okay, because it was still great music! The source material is good, so the copycats are good too. But with Roy Blair's Cat Heaven, we have an album that borrows generously from other music, and does so very competently, but the original music is SHIT. So what does that make Cat Heaven? Also shit? Yeah, probably.
And when I say that Blair "competently" copies Top 40, I honestly have no way of knowing if that is actually true. It's true to my ears, but then again, I listen to a lot of what Billboard's top echelons have to offer, and it really, truly all sounds the same to me (ugh, I know, that's such an Old Man thing to say, I'm sorry). But those artists are making the fucking MONEY, so I can't really fault Blair for attempting to get his piece and offering up his own watered down version.
Here's another thing I don't know well enough to judge, but I'm going to judge anyway, because I'm writing a critique, and judgment is warranted regardless—Roy Blair is a shitty rapper. He cannot rap, and I say this based on every metric I am even remotely familiar with. His flow is stilted, a flow that many young pasty white men with pink hair tend to possess. His rhymes are awkward and lazy (as far as I know, verses like "9-5 to my last breath / Break my back / I'm bad at sex / This outfit doesn't match the rest / Yeah!" aren't lighting the world on fire).
But is he even a rapper? This is our next question. It's an age-old question, really. If it looks like a duck and raps like a duck, is it actually a duck? Or just some asshole kid from LA doing his best approximation of a duck? This is hip hop in collage form, a collage made by a 4th grader wearing grillz on Halloween, using his mom's best pair of scissors to cut out pictures and lyrics from a contraband XXL magazine.
Okay, shit, maybe that was too harsh? Let's admit now that, every once in a while, Cat Heaven can actually be a little catchy. Cat Heaven is occasionally catchy the same way Willow occasionally has a clean diaper—very briefly, and probably by accident. If a million Roy Blairs were writing a million songs for a million Post Malone-based Pandora playlists, there's going to inevitably be a few winners. Cat Heaven's winner is "Perfume," an overall subpar song that has a chorus that, if I'm being completely serious and honest, has burrowed its way into my head and taken up residence.
But the chorus to "Perfume" is unfortunately the end of the road as far as stand-out songs go here. My opinion on the matter is not born out of ignorance, I promise you. My number of listens to this album is in the double digits. And after hearing Cat Heaven for hours and hours this week, I literally still cannot tell many of these songs apart. This is algorithm rap. Roy Blair doesn't want to stand out, he wants to fit in. He succeeds, but this is to his absolute detriment. It's completely forgettable and, at times, just fucking embarrassing.
And the most disappointing thing is that the album has barely anything to do with cats!!! The feline absence in his songs, besides a couple passing asides, betrays the album's true intentions—this is nothing more than a bad swipe at becoming a meme. Roy Blair is groveling to the lowest common denominator. I will treat this album like I treat every other goddamn cat meme that I happen upon—I will ignore it.
Pam, who is too busy to write a review this week, shared her opinion with me the other day, and I'll leave you with her thoughts now: "This sounds like something Weezer would be trying to do today." Considering the dire state of Weezer currently and its dubious history of dalliances with quasi-rap, I can think of no better damning critique than Pam's words.
GRADE: 0.5 pukes out of 5
No comments:
Post a Comment