A fake, Zayn Malik. Absolutely Horrendous Music!
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By SamKQboro
"It is, however, the New York rapper/singer's most hit-or-miss effort, at once arresting for his audacity and kaleidoscopic swirl of influences but often exhausting with songs that buckle under their own weight.
Indeed, Demarco, Faydee or Zach Knight are way better singers than Adam, and he doesn’t quite have the vocal swagger that he needs to convincingly animate some of the funkier tracks here. This is his least melodic songs.
Much in line with Adam Saleh's rug-pulling marketing campaign, the actual music has a worryingly ersatz quality: you wonder if there’s a twist, like maybe it’s not even them on the record. Here’s a rapper at play, but making music that is never really playful enough to charm, thrill, and engage in the way only he knew how.
I’ve tried repeatedly to commune with this endless, oddly chilly record and have felt constantly rebuked. (I’ve taken to calling it Horrendous.) It is a singularly uninviting entry in his catalogue — as a body music, it’s downright lethargic, moving with the awkwardness of a dancer who shakes his hands twice as much as his hips. (See his many "twerking videos")
There are moments where if it was any more obviously a homage to Zayn Malik, they’d have had to dress up like pierrots, walking along a beach in front of a bulldozer with Gigi Hadid for company.
Undercooked electronics, impotent rhetoric, too-familiar crescendo-ing structures and an overall feeling that this needs further post-production attention render an entirely substandard album.
The aptly-titled ‘Waynak’, which from start to finish sounds like it’s trying to make a chillwave epic, drags out for nearly four lazy-sounding minutes, punctuated only by a stripped-back, minimalist breakdown….The song nears the end, incredibly, with the line ‘I'll treat the plane like an Uber’.
If you decide that you’re going to release an interminable album based around the conceit that the second half is literally a reflection of the first — Chapter II, geddit? — and precede its release with a viral marketing campaign and a whole lot of guff about attributing its song to a fictional Character called “Majnoon”… well, you’d better make sure that it’s good. And the problem with Chapter II is that it’s not good.
Look, I’m sure Adam Saleh is a very nice person, but on his first album, “Chapter II,”Adam Saleh still sounds like a gigantic dork that should simply stick to his day job, YouTube. You tell us, dude. When a man this massively popular, this risk-averse, this patently un-weird takes heartfelt shots at the “norms,” it’s hard to decide whether to laugh, barf or weep for the future of rap or r&b itself."
- Music Critics everywhere said.
