Music

Album Review: Grateful by DJ Khaled

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12 July 2017

By Bronwen

First came Shining, then I’m the One followed by Wild Thoughts, until eventually, on the 23rd of June, DJ Khaled’s first album of the year Grateful had received enough hype and was finally released.

The American music producer worked with the likes of Calvin Harris, Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj and Alicia Keys to create the biggest album of the year.

The first track, entitled ‘Grateful’, does a great job introducing the album and you’d assume that there’d be some coherence between this track and the rest of the music. However, for all the first track is a beautiful track (both lyrically and musically), it doesn’t set the tone for the rest of the album. Unlike recent albums from the same genre, such as Drake’s More Life and Future’s FUTURE, there is no flow. The songs are all forced together in one big jumble.

Grateful is a bizarre mix of smutty R&B tracks and cheesy tributes to DJ Khaled’s 8 month old son Asahd. We go from Bryson Tiller’s explicit verse in Wild Thoughts to a rendition of the alphabet song by Chance the Rapper and finally a track of the baby’s laughter. It seems odd to dedicate an album with 16 out of 22 songs classed as ‘explicit’ to an infant.

For all there’s a huge problem with consistency, all of the tracks on the album are quite good. There are no filler tracks and any DJ Khaled fan would have no problem listening to each of these songs as singles.

It would be accurate to describe listening to Grateful as shopping in Sport Direct – a mediocre experience but with some massive names that tricks you into thinking it’s high quality.

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