No way. s---'s still a mess and a bunch of different sounding songs slapped together.
Apart from tracks 1-3, those flow beautifully and have a similar simplicity and stripped-down production and tonalities to them, those first 3 flow great but then it just falls apart.
No album which has Walk on Water AND Framed can be better than Kam. That's not an album. That's two completely different songs, sounds, directions, and going 'ima just put these on the same CD'.
Kam is a focused, restrained, atom bomb. 1 aesthetic from start to finish. There's some creative s--- and beat changes and different ideas in there but it sounds like one family of music, the sum is greater than its parts. Revival is just a bunch of songs which don't belong together... stuck together. And because his entire aim of the album was trying to please everybody... it's almost like you can feel that, in the music. Like, I can feel that Framed is contrived because he's just trying to do it for Relapse fans... not that he just felt like making it, all the music has this dead feel to it. It's his worst album. Worse than Encore. I never feel like listening to it.
Also why the h---, out of all the tracks you could choose... would you put Need Me there. One of the worst songs on the album. Need Me, Bad Husband, Tragic Endings.... argggggh, such a drag. Heavy, clumsy, repetitive, noisy, mushy crap.
Much, much improved by shortening it though but not a scratch on Kam. Kam is his first proper album since Recovery... in terms of a sound, a theme, a vibe, but his first REAL win to rap fans and just as a very unflawed piece of work, a body of work, a 'thing' (as in tracks which all go together to result in an overall feel and a creation which is greater as a sum... his first real THAT since TES.
Also just speaking about the individual elements of the work - his writing is better, the production is miles better. The production is fully all hip-hop again, no compromises, no BS, it's good to listen to and there's contrast again... For the longest time Em hasn't seemed to realise that if HE is fast and loud and aggressive... the beat also being that creates a mess, a clash, and he kept using terrible beats by Alex Da Kid who is just horrible and everything was just cheese and badly made. Kam beats actually have MOOD, FEEL and they're good to listen to and give his voice centre stage, like Lucky You being stripped and moody and slower as he speeds over it... the contrast is beautiful. He hasn't had that harmony since Relapse...
Then the writing, the writing is so much better. There is some genius wordplay and puns on Kam, there's some great writing on Revival too but also SO much lazy writing. There's maybe 2 lazy lines I heard on Kam but Revival is full of them... this kind of pickle that we're in is hard to dill/deal.... Are you serious? A kindergarten teacher pill dickle pun on his supposed Trump anthem to lift America? Awful. And there's so many moments like that...
Kam on the other hand - "when your reign is over, you'll hardly be missed"... Brilliant. "I got a couple of mansions, still I don't have any manors"... Brilliant; contextual, relevant to himself, the song, another of his endless string of self-referential descriptive character mythologizing (angry, women hating, crazed, anti-social etc.)... a clever way of basically saying 'I'm rich but still trash'... that kind of writing is night and day to most Revival puns and he is consistently this good throughout Kam.
Not to say Revival has no brilliance; Arose is premium, stellar writing and performance, in my opinion maybe his best written emotional song, a powerhouse... but in general on the album - it's all over the place, inconsistent and full of trash. Kam is consistent, cohesive, a vision, it doesn't go off course much, has very little dull moments... really great 8/10 effort and some of his best rapping ever.
Random tracks stuck together isn't an album, it's a mixtape. Revival isn't an album. It's a bag of s---.
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