Alex Thompson cringes his way through Drake's latest mixtape, as the rapper desperately flirts with drill, trap and dance hall.
With his latest mixtape Dark Lane Demos, Candadian rapper and personality vacuum Drake continues to underwhelm with a collection of lacklustre and flat RnB infused hip hop. Flirting with elements of drill, afrobeat and trap, Drake delivers an underbaked mixtape of rarities and b-sides that no one really wanted to hear. The rapper’s paint-by-numbers approach to beats and bars leaves a lot to be desired, and while there are glimmers of what could be a great album, Drake ultimately falls short.
Most of the tracks are your standard, underwhelming Drake cut. There’s the slightly flat ‘Deep Pockets’, the Views throwback ‘Desires’ and the quite frankly terrible ‘Not You Too’ featuring RnB wife-beater Chris Brown. There’s just no weight behind any of these tracks, they have no punch and no drive. They go nowhere and feel ultimately inconsequential. Drake is at his best when he is making music which pushes him out of his comfort zone and forces him to show passion and creativity (see More Life). Most of the tracks on Dark Lane Demos are completely devoid of this.
There are some quite good verse dotted about the track list but it's probably not a good sign that I can't remember which tracks they are on. They all just blend together.
The long awaited Playboi Carti collaboration ‘Pain 1993’ is a track of two halves. While Drake delivers a half decent verse, the instrumental feels stunted and awkward. This is only amplified by Playboi Carti’s worst verse to date, the rapper sounding like he phoned in with a half-arsed verse and couldn’t be bothered to do a second take. As a Carti fan, this was crushing to hear.
It’s not just some new material from the self-proclaimed 6 God, however. Drake throws in a couple of his latest TikTok friendly singles into the mix as well as a couple of previously released cuts. On ‘Toosie Slide’, Drake delivers a song that wouldn’t be so bad if wasn’t so obviously created to be a TikTok dance. Mate, the last time I heard someone try and deliver dance instructions in a song it was the ‘Cha-Cha Slide’. Remove the “right foot up, left foot slide” and you’re left with a half-decent Drake track. Then you have ‘War’ where everyone’s favourite Canadian ‘culture vulture’ (see Wiley) takes on a generic UK drill type beat. He did it to dancehall, now he’s done it to drill. Drake - you’re not from the roads, no matter how hard you try to rap with a London accent. Please stop.
I’ve often argued that Drake is only successful by sheer force of numbers. The man has absolutely flooded the market with inoffensive club rap tracks for the past decade and his quantity over quality approach to songwriting has left him with a back catalogue deeper than his pockets but with surprisingly few classic tunes. Let’s call this the Scorpion formula. There's so much shit that the good stuff gets buried. Dark Lane Demos follows this formula. It feels like Drake only released it because he felt like he hasn’t dropped anything in a while, and rather than actually putting together a tight and cohesive mixtape or album, he just strings together some TikTok friendly tunes with a couple of rarities that probably shouldn’t have seen the light of day.
3/10
Alex Thompson
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