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Entertainment WeeklyMay 30, 2013The-Dream is one of R&B's best talkers and he flexes that weird, wordy, girl-crazy mind all over IV Play's lush love jams. [31 May/7 Jun 2013, p.136]
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May 30, 2013IV Play is a collection of sexy jams that falls somewhere between Usher-type bedroom music and the progressive R&B The-Dream’s great at.
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May 31, 2013IV Play succeeds in spades with its production and songwriting.
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Jun 3, 2013Despite gestating for years, IV Play is an album that feels unattended to.
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May 30, 2013IV Play finds Dream delving into more sounds and styles than ever before.
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May 29, 2013Interestingly, the album’s emotive selection happens to be its most musically daring as well.
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May 28, 2013If his booty-poppin' subject matter isn't original, the kaleidoscope R&B butter-storms he cooks up give his sexcapades a hallucinatory drama.
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May 28, 2013IV Play may not always hit that high bar, but the artist's persistence and perfectionism are clear, and the results bear as pure of a pedigree as ever.
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May 28, 2013[IV Play revisits] Nash’s usual tropes through a more varied sound palette that demonstrates a willingness to experiment and, at rare and glorious points, a raw sense of urgency fuelled by his bitterness.
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May 28, 2013Notwithstanding a couple musical blemishes, IV Play diligently continues The-Dream’s tenure as one of the premier acts in R&B.
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May 29, 2013Sticking with him through the machinations of the music industry has never been more difficult than it is now, but IV Play still has its rewards.
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Jun 10, 2013This is an album of average to good songs, with only a few highlights.
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Jun 6, 2013He sounds bored. So am I.
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Jun 4, 2013Even Dream’s production, which was voluptuously orchestrated, has turned static; there’s an ashen militarism to be heard in these slow, sad songs.
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May 28, 2013The-Dream barely breaks new ground artistically and the set doesn’t approach his finest effort, “Love vs. Money,” but the music is often so seductive it’s easy to ignore a misstep (“New Orleans”) and often distracting auto-tuning.
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May 28, 2013There’s enough pulling power to draw you in, just not enough to get you hooked.
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Jun 6, 2013As IV Play demonstrates, the well of ideas has run dry and the magic is gone.
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May 28, 2013He's never been one for lyrical subtlety, but this set contains several stretches of monotonous, joyless carnality.
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Jun 4, 2013The lyrical and musical content of IV Play doesn’t stray far from the Top 40 standards of mind-numbing repetition and stories about getting high and having sex.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 11
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Mixed: 2 out of 11
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Negative: 2 out of 11
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Jun 18, 2013
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Jun 11, 2013