Review Summary: She ride your wave like a dolphin till you lay in the coffin.
Who is ILOVEMAKONNEN, and why should you care? Well, that's a bit complicated. Hailing from Atlanta, ILOVEMAKONNEN is a rapper and singer who retains a strong influence from bedroom-produced music. Recently he rose to fame, after Drake released a remixed version of Makonnens song „Club Goin' Up On A Tuesday“. Oh, and he has a really weird obsession with doll-heads. You know, the usual.
Makonnens style can be very aptly summed up by saying that Young Thug and Drake had a child that tried to be as brooding as Drake and as weird as Thugger. And while this is not a bad idea per se, this EP, his first really commercial release, is ridden by faults that are very hard to ignore. First of all, this guy can't sing to save his life. His singing and the autotune he uses are so out of tune and unavoidable that they actually pose a serious threat to your mental health. My best advice would be, to go into this EP prepared for some seriously amateur-sounding voices.
As for beat-choices, there is really not that much to talk about. Metro Boomin, Sonny Digital, DJ Spinz and 808 Mafia deliver some really underwhelming instrumentals on here. They are functional, maybe sometimes a bit melancholic or ethereal, but nothing too special. Your standard Atlanta beat-affair, you could say. But this isn't really where the point of this EP lies, it's rather in the way the beats are juxtaposed against or work with Makonnens flows and voice. And to be honest, there are some interesting ideas on here. Makonnen uses his style to portray his weird persona quite well most of the time, with his weird falsetto, his deep tenor voice or fluctuating between them fluently. And while this is, as I said before, interesting, what dooms all of this is the fact, that Makonnen really is not talented that much.
The lyrics are a completely different beast. We learn very important things on this EP. First of all, this guy doesn't really like his ex-girlfriends. There is some serious heartbroken atmosphere on this project, and not in the sometimes interesting or amusingly cheesy ways that Drake sometimes comes up with, but rather in a way that resembles a teenager, who just had a breakup and went to write songs about it. Truly charming. Also, he has no time to party on the weekends, so he has to go to the club on a Tuesday. Besides that, his straw-ber-ita dreams turned into champagne realities. Riveting.
But that's not to say there are no highlights on this. First of all, no matter how bad of a singer and rapper he is, most of his songs retain a low-quality charm, not far away from the way a lot of unknown singer/songwriters can't sing at all, but we can't help but feel enthralled by their, let's say, cuteness. And sometimes he focuses and tries to sing actually good, which works in his favors on tracks like Too Much or parts of Meant To Be. And, as evident in songs like the successful Tuesday, sometimes even his heavily affected falsetto can be tolerable at least.
This is a really divisive EP, because in spite of what Makonnen brings to the table in terms of actually interesting and refreshingly weird ideas, he also destroys a lot of them by not being able to live up to his ambitions, amateur mistakes and not being able to write engaging lyrics. I guess, in the end it's up to you to build your own opinion of him, because in the end, he is at least an interesting artist. And that's better than not being anything at all.
