"Awaken, My Love!"

Charming, incredibly soulful and emotionally charged, this record introduces us to a whole new, golden side of Donald Glover--and should elevate him to a new level of stardom.

Despite this galling blunder ["California," an infuriating interruption to an otherwise cohesive project], Gambino knocks Awaken out of the park.

The result is an earthy, positive album that buzzes with authenticity and pride.

Glover has delivered an inter-generational, retro-futuristic 11-track history lesson on the healing and inspiring qualities of funk.

The album transpires without so much as a lyrical couplet--exchanging raps for electromagnetic soul and fluorescent funk--and will ultimately be remembered for its experimentation over its execution.

Glover is an artist who often pushes himself into new mediums and now new styles of music. While a further development of the concepts on Because The Internet could have seen an interesting continuation on the hip-hop arc of Childish Gambino, Glover instead introduced a new element.

"Awaken, My Love" is a stone-cold blast from beginning to end.

Childish Gambino gets definite props for pushing the envelope and refusing to operate within any genre confinements on this refreshing 49-minute trip through the funkadelic 1970s. While these blurred lines make this album a little hard to follow, “Awaken, My Love!” proves his versatility as a rapper turning over a new leaf.

It’s at once a homage and a parody, equally aware of that era’s excesses and its glories, of the way that the most memorable 1970s R&B merged sensuality, activism, humor, toughness, outlandishness, futurism, soul roots, wild eccentricity and utopian community spirit. That’s an extremely high bar, but at its best, “Awaken, My Love!” recalls many of those virtues.

When Gambino plays it straight he sounds majestic.

Throughout, Glover’s genre fluency is unimpeachable; the only minor drawback is the overmannered air of some of these period pieces, where there could be more straight-up abandon, as on the persuasive Me and Your Mama.

Colourful, brilliantly messy, and a fully committed hodge-podge of psych and spacecake croons, ‘Awaken, My Love!’ is unlikely to shed further light on exactly what Childish Gambino is at heart, but by now, Glover’s erratic approach is surely part of his central appeal.

Only the limitations of his voice occasionally let him down--he doesn’t quite have the range to nail Awaken’s more ostentatious vocal lines. Still, it’s a minor gripe when there’s so much here to enjoy.

Some of the same issues that dogged Childish Gambino’s previous attempts at this sort of powerful expression linger here, but Glover’s anguished wail strikes a far more resonant chord than his impish punchlines.

There are times, however, when that nodding feels more like mimicry than anything else. Maybe he’ll figure out how to smuggle Donald Glover’s heart into Childish Gambino’s brain eventually, but if he hasn’t figured out what he wants out of Childish Gambino yet, it’s increasingly rewarding watching him try.

A fine collection of choice influences, Awaken plays more as an homage to the past than forward-thinking artistic statement from a vital young voice.

That combination of bottled passion and efficiency spreads itself evenly through the 11-track set.

While the rest of the album, produced by longtime collaborator Ludwig Göransson, doesn't quite equal that sensational single, it's still an inspired detour from a multi-talented hyphenate who has already dazzled us this fall with his critically acclaimed comedy-drama, Atlanta.

Simply put, for all of its creative pomposity, "Awaken, My Love!" isn't any better than Because the Internet, a solidly impressive record that brought Glover as close to bona fide in the rap community as possible.

This radiantly executed effort is also, curiously, Childish Gambino's most anonymous. [Feb 2017, p.92]]

What's missing is a sense of Glover himself as a defining character. [Feb 2017, p.112]

A maddening ride with an authenticity problem, Awaken, My Love! finds Glover confusing his idols for muses.

What we get is an interesting departure from his usual work, but not interesting enough to create the eternal music that he is talented enough to execute.