This collaborative album from Quavo and Travis Scott comes after a year in which the pair individually dominated rap, the former with pointillist pronouncements, the latter with warbling AutoTune melodies. But their often magnetic signature styles veer close to gimmickry here. Scott’s top line on Motorcycle Patches is a very pale imitation of his superior Butterfly Effect, and he lazily imitates Drake’s Gyalchester on Dubai Shit. Quavo’s tic of adding monosyllabic ad-libs to every single line increasingly makes him sound like a diamond-craving mynah bird, and his lyrical scope – exclusively drugs, cars, money and women – is more blinkered than ever before.
But the production props them up strongly, from the nimble half-stepping on Best Man to the psychedelic synth solo on Saint Laurent Mask, and Shigeo Sekito’s The Word II – previously lifted by indie slacker Mac DeMarco – gets sampled to beautiful effect on How U Feel.
