Vince Staples — FM! ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 11/13/2018
This was a very weak display all around from someone who sounded like they were given the go-ahead to do whatever they wanted and then tried to get everything done as quickly as possible. The work’s artistic setup and designed flow turned out to be the only aspect feeding the fire until the very end; an album dressed up as a radio show was a pretty interesting concept. What wasn’t interesting, though, was the lack of variety in metric accents along with the general diluted sonic textures and the absence of any kind of development. Perhaps the radio station setting served a more realistic purpose than expected, since it made sense that people would be changing the dial rather frequently here and cutting these tracks short in an attempt to find something on the air that’s more engaging.
It’s pretty cut and dry what I thought went wrong here. At the front of an already insubstantial and static sonic layer was a rather annoying, patterned out, throwaway rhythmic mainstay from the melodies. Staples ran away from the spotlight, reverting to easygoing eighth note and triplet combinations within rather slow tempos that always accented a strong beat and rhymed the ends of lines where it was all too obvious. This happened pretty consistently, with an exception being the song “Don’t Get Chipped” which included a little more drive and thoughtful accenting in the verses by use of continuous eighth note runs over the bar. Aside from that, there wasn’t any showcase in rhythmic variety, lyrical twist, or gratifying phrasing, which are three elements that should be more present when pitch is absent. Staples was never completely wretched on the mic, as his patterns at least had a bit of pulse and direction to them. He was mostly just rather boring.
The boring melodic layer that left itself out in the cold didn’t match well with the almost as boring timbral foundation. The timbre consisted of no more and no less than a simple drum machine beat and one countermelodic synthesizer for basically the entire work. That minimalist formula doesn’t reap many rewards when tempos are unchanging, meters are static, and the countermelody has no real structural role. Despite noticeable dynamic shifts between each short song and switches from dark to bright timbres in the synth, everything underneath the vocals still regressed to a mean of being unenthusiastic, uncared for afterthoughts. That’s not to say a neat sonority wasn’t struck at times, with some minor scale riffs in the background actually making sense and giving something to pay attention to, like in the opening song “Feels Like Summer”, despite not growing to become anything impactful. It was simply a rather plain, run-of-the-mill sonic layer that didn’t offend but certainly didn’t inspire, sounding like backing tracks that could be downloaded for free off of public domain sites.
Everything had lots more room for improvement, and it starts with not hindering the potential development of a musical idea. The isolated musical ideas found here weren’t embarrassingly awful, but they weren’t coated with anything of interest and had no sense of direction from beginning to end. If a piece of music has obvious meters and is highlighting rhythm, a sense of forward progression is paramount, and that’s a major area this album lacked in. Instead, this was a string of short seamless clips of material that made no presence or purpose of themselves. They were rather tame and insignificant clips at that. I have nothing wrong against a short album. In fact, I’m very happy that this was as short as it was. That’s no excuse for not being able to pack a punch in any track.
