REVIEW: Drake – “Take Care”

DRAKE / TAKE CARE / UNIVERSAL

Finding comfort in what you do is imperative as it is therapeutic. It allows one to examine themselves, dig up the secluded side to their personality and overshadow it with positives that, in turn, open the door to maturation and set standards that continually overlap each other. On Take Care, Drake is more complacent than he’s ever been. While Thank Me Later was a studio intro that was arrogant as it was charismatic, the youthful jabs about fame and dollar signs and temporary love are now developed. It doesn’t mean the dazed, mellow confessions are gone. As most have cried, Drake is more “emo” than he was seventeen months ago and while it’s visible in lustful new soul (“Cameras”) and simplistic R&B jams (“Doing It Wrong”), the album isn’t an entirely depressing theatrical piece. Instead, it’s Drake tapping into his preference to not be a generic by revealing emotions found in everyday people.

Some cases like “Practice” and the closing bit “Buried Alive” struggle by grasping too much to handle, but when it’s disclosed in an open-book concept (“Look What You’ve Done”), it’s almost corruptive: “Now it’s ‘F*ck you, I hate you, I’ll move out in a heartbeat’ / And I leave out and you call me, tell me that you’re sorry / You love me, and I love you, and your heart hurts, mine does too”. It’s a trait Drake’s discovered and nurtured as it’s prominent in the first ten tracks of Take Care – an arrangement that inches towards perfection. On “Over My Dead Body”, he reaffirms his status over a 100% Canadian pop hook, whereas “Crew Love” and the title track “Take Care” push out Rihanna and Toronto’s The Weeknd to deliver this seductive, sexual melodramatic hip hop blow that effectively runs into a three-minute rant about his rise from the uptown and the underground (“Under Ground Kings”). It’s apparent Drake is focused on obtaining that “art money”, and through massacring the sophomore curse and revealing the intimacy in rap (“Marvin’s Room”) it’s pretty much his.

Download: “Take Care”, “Crew Love”, “Look What You’ve Done”

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