Drake’s direction of travel in recent years has been surprisingly steady. Not only has he shown progression as a songwriter, he’s carved a niche for himself in a music industry that is historically volatile when faced with the notion of rappers being anything other than red-blooded thugs.
Which is why it’s easy to be wary of people, critics in particular, jumping on the bandwagon after years slating him. Drake’s last mixtape, ‘If You're Reading This It's Too Late’, wasn’t so much a radical jump up in quality as a more polished version of his work to that point.
Considering its apparently rushed release, it was a remarkably cohesive project that made use of low-key yet hard hitting beats, catchy flows and memorable motifs.
The fact that Drake was talking about ‘Views’ (or ‘Views from the Six’ as it was originally intended) as far back as then suggested that we could expect a similarly well crafted album, only one much bigger and better.
‘Views’ is certainly about spectacle. The album is 20 tracks long, features a legion of producers and has Drake atop Toronto’s colossal CN Tower on the cover. You’d think, therefore, that it could only go one of two ways. But we’re actually left with a surprisingly tame piece where Drake feels stuck in his own headspace.
The opening track, Keep the Family, is a pretty good summary of the album as a whole, hinting at the grandiose with sporadic bursts of strings but never hitting the accelerator. Instead we’re treated to Drake singing aimlessly about, well, typical Drake themes. Here it’s about losing touch with friends, but sometimes it’s about losing a girl.
Drake sticking to more mellow production isn’t a bad thing and most of the beats on this record are just as subdued as those on his last project, if not more so. The trouble is that they work as little more than mood music when Drake sounds so bored. And ‘Views’, for the most part, is depressingly boring. After years of preparation, Drake’s flows are samey and uninteresting, the hooks are minimal and the lyrics aren’t remotely up to scratch. On tracks like Redemption and Child’s Play he even crosses the line from whiny and possessive to downright misogynistic: “Take you to the mall and get a new outfit. Girl, that’s just some child’s play.”
Drake tends to keep sensitivity and braggadocio on separate tracks and is often criticised as being inconsistent for it, but at least it makes him feel human. On ‘Views’, he lacks his usual wit and appears aloof and disconnected from everyday concerns. Last year’s Meek Mill disses demonstrated that he can at least be combative, but on the nominally harder hitting tracks, like Still Here, we get lines like: “I see your girl all the time, though I can’t tell if she’s yours or mine.” You really showed him there, Drake.
We do get a little fire eventually, on Grammys and pre-album single Pop Style, but by that point we’re over halfway through an album that is well over an hour long. There are few palate cleansers along the way and Hotline Bling, by far the most fun thing here, is tacked on at the end like a bonus track.
After all the fanfare, ‘Views’ is a damp squib. It’s a mercilessly long record that says nothing that Drake hasn’t conveyed better elsewhere. As background music it’s just about as listenable as any of his other records, but it could have been so much more. It’s possible that he’s peaked, but it’s also possible that he just didn’t put the effort in.
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