Certified Lover Boy

CLB can feel formulaic, as if checking off boxes on an executive producer’s clipboard. Despite the frequent predictability, it’s exciting to see a consummate professional at work.

The album suffers from this unfocused overabundance of voices. ... It’s ultimately a shame since Certified Lover Boy could have very well been Drake’s best record. Sonically, it’s his most impressive offering to date.

“Certified Lover Boy” is a perfectly fine record — it’s expensively well-produced, like all of Drake’s albums, and easily likable with a decent batting average for a nearly hour-and-a-half record.

The resulting record is largely another missed opportunity for experimentation from the man many consider the current best rapper in the game. Yes, the theatrics, and introspection, and even a few moments of musical deftness, are there. But overall, it’s nothing to depart from 2018’s Scorpion or 2016’s Views. There’s nothing groundbreaking here.

Drake’s new release may lack some of the variety of his previous albums, but its concepts and musical structure make for a solid body of work.

With much of Certified Lover Boy, Drake seems to be doing what he thinks Drake would do, and ticking the box is taking its toll.

It demonstrates how sonically rigorous even the most casual, tossed-off Drake songs are. But its storytelling doesn’t always hold up to strict scrutiny. ... “Certified Lover Boy” is his least musically imaginative album, the one where he pushes himself the least in terms of method and pattern.

As it stands now, the album is an overlong, undercooked, and cliched listen that will no doubt appeal to the Drake fans who can't get enough of him, but will leave anyone looking for something new sadly out of luck.

CLB is a serviceable enough Drake album, but he has a number of prior projects that showcase his dynamic rap abilities and frenemy quarrels at a much higher calibre.

Personally, sonically and thematically, Drake seems resistant to change. It’s frustrating: the songs aren’t bad, and in some cases they’re excellent, a reminder of the unflattering emotional honesty that initially set him apart from his peers. However, they also hew to a formula that works for him.

Aubrey Graham hands over his fifth project to cross 80 minutes, an hour and a half smorgasbord of all-new tracks. In his defence, the Drake cuisine is far too extensive and varied at this point, but this dilemma has been around for a number of years now and some sort of sacrifice for a better, more cohesive project has to be made if he wants to release another classic.

The new album is like watching the eighth season of a sitcom and growing hyper-aware of all the recycled jokes and actors' laugh lines.

Certified Lover Boy is polished, well-executed and yet is completely devoid of ambition or memorable moments.

It’s beige, hollow music and that’s what ultimately frustrates your dedicated rap listener because it doesn’t make sense why it’s so damn popular. When you throw the poor writing on top of this, and some real hit-and-miss production into the mix, “Certified Lover Boy” may well be Drake’s worst album.

Drake comes across as an artist who’s bought into his mythos and persona a bit too ardently. ... The production on Certified Lover Boy is svelte yet airless, filled with lots of solemn piano lines and muted snares but absent of big flourishes or attempts at pop crossover. It’s an approach that’s likely aiming for tasteful restraint, but the effect is languid and rather directionless.

Things start promisingly with the undulating Champagne Poetry dextrously reflecting on loneliness (“career is going great, but now the rest of me is fading slowly”), while Papi’s Home recalls early Kanye, of all people, with its sped-up samples and laid-back flow. Later, however, that playfulness calcifies into headline-grabbing stunts. ... This is an album destined to be filleted for various #mood playlists, anchored only by its creator’s untouchable fame.

Yet another unimpressive, tedious release.

Certified Lover Boy’s greatest crime is just how bland and boring it is. There’s very little here that Drake has not done better or more emphatically elsewhere; his album is deprived of any kind of experimentation or insight. He rose to the top baring his soul. Now it feels like there’s no soul to bare.