Throughout, his phone vibrates with text messages from his girlfriend. The excellent 12.38 could be an episode of Atlanta, in which Earn – the central everyman character played by Glover – has an encounter with a girl who feeds him psilocybin (he is comically unsure what psilocybin is). 3.15.20 really excels when Glover experiments with form, texture and sensory overloadīecause of Glover’s background as an actor and show-runner, some of these songs have the feel of narrative fiction. Keen to wow a mainstream audience, Glover and his collaborators continue the bravura fusion of soulfulness, funk and trap established by his two previous breakthrough albums, 2016’s soul-drenched Awaken, My Love! and its 2013 predecessor, Because the Internet.
DONALD GLOVER AWAKEN MY LOVE ALBUM COVER SERIES
Like This Is America – the standalone track that was one of the cultural high-water marks of 2018 – or Atlanta – the groundbreaking TV series Glover created in 2016 – 3.15.20 is as layered as an onion. There are meditations here on love and self-love, and hook-ups with girls while high on magic mushrooms. Listen to Childish Gambino’s new album in full. But this record was worth the wait and is worth your time, a comprehensive deep-dive made for the dedicated concentration of self-isolation. A song like Feels Like Summer – now renamed 42.26 – was a hit two years ago Glover’s last UK tour 12 months ago found room for both the hard-hitting Algorhythm – a dance tune about how humans are outsourcing decision-making to AI – and Time, which blanches at the impending apocalypse alongside Ariana Grande. It is long delayed, probably because Glover was busy playing the young Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story and Simba in The Lion King his father also died, and last year Glover made a short film, Guava Island, starring Rihanna. It comes in two forms, one without track breaks, credited to Donald Glover, and one with, credited to Childish Gambino.
Now, Glover’s fourth studio effort, named after the day it was first streamed with little warning via, feels like one of the year’s major musical events. His 2011 debut album as Childish Gambino, Camp, drew curiosity and disdain. The result is an experiment in time travel: Through sounds of the past, he captures the tensions of the present.If last week now seems forever ago to most of us, a geological aeon has elapsed since Donald Glover – a then medium-famous US TV actor – was widely derided as a try-hard rap dilettante. Coming from an artist known for taut wordplay and manically constructed similes, the broad strokes of Awaken are a shift: You’ll think eventually, but mood comes first.Īnd in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that followed the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and so many more, Glover’s choice to echo a period in Black music when artists took on an explicitly revolutionary cast is a canny complement to albums like Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Solange Knowles’ A Seat at the Table, both of which explored Black identity with new urgency. It makes for a tonal fluidity that also marks his work on the television show Atlanta, which he created.
Like a funhouse mirror, he stretches his influences into weird shapes: The freak-outs are exaggerated to the point of comedy (“Me and Your Mama”) and the ballads romantic to the point of creepy (“Terrified”). Glover said he’d started with childhood memories of his parents playing Funkadelic and The Isley Brothers on the stereo: specific sounds and songs, but more importantly, a general feeling-one that Glover wasn’t quite old enough to grasp. On the face of it, Donald Glover’s “Awaken, My Love!” is a museum-quality rip of early-’70s funk and soul: the faded vocals, the fuzzed-out guitars, the collective sense of chaos and exuberance.
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