>Giveon - Give or Take

I should say, if you're a Giveon fan, all respect to you and you can take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt. But I rarely dislike something so distinctly that when I do, I feel like I have to vent somewhere. So here goes.

I've been pretty lukewarm on him since I first heard him but always feel like I should check for him.

With this album, after one listen that I struggled to get through, I'm calling it:

This is the sort of record that makes me rethink my stalwart denial of objective good and bad in music.

It's like someone fed some parameters of bedroom r&b with an "interesting" male voice into an AI machine and this is what it spat out.

The music's boring.

He's boring. He has a boring voice that flaps around like a balloon that's had all the air sucked out of it, and with it all its life, any sense of soul or spirit.

A lot of the songs go nowhere.

When they do go somewhere, they're often so on the nose that it feels like karaoke.

The one redeeming feature is occasionally the production --- but it's nothing special and certainly not worth the price of admission.

After this album, I'm convinced that I'd be annoyed with him even if he was doing something banal, like announcing upcoming stops on the el or telling us to turn off our phones before a movie. Even those voices - which are in fact sometimes robots - often have some semblance of personality, that they do, in fact, exist in the world, with arms and legs and occasionally an emotion or two.

Some skit on the album has him saying something like "but I'm a lover, you know?" and I gagged a bit, first on the bit itself and then on the fact that I'd wasted my time on the album and him in general. I wasn't even giving it my undivided attention and it still felt like I'd betrayed my time's inherent value somehow --- I could have gotten more dishes done in that forty-five minutes if I hadn't been half-listening to this record.

It's called Give or Take. Whatever pun I make on the title would be obvious and yet I'm having a very very hard time resisting the urge.

So from this day forth, I will not be fooled by any suggestions that Giveon has something to offer me as an R&B fan, a music fan, or really as a human being. I share this as a note of caution: take heed!

-thebigfunk

~ i could still snort you under the table ~