Infantile Gambino Desires to Be Donald Glover on ‘Bando Stone & the New World’

Who’s the actual Infantile Gambino? The punchline rapper of 2013’s As a result of the Web, exploring his id crises alongside the majestic film magic of Ludwig Göransson? The psychedelic funkateer of 2016’s “Awaken My Love” who sang psychedelic ragers about love, unity and riot? The experimental R&B star of 2020’s 3.20.2020, who tinkered with dance and nation and all types of Prince-isms? The reply, after all, is all the above, so don’t be shocked that his fifth and supposedly ultimate album, Bando Stone & the New World, has the actor-writer-director-comedian-singer-rapper-songwriter-producer bouncing between style like he bounces between movie roles. 

The multi-hyphenate auteur born Donald Glover has been threatening to retire the “Infantile Gambino” moniker for about seven years and Bando Stone appears like he needs to revisit every part he loves and verify a number of issues off of his bucket listing for good measure. There’s love songs and proud dad songs, corrosive industrial rap and gleaming pop-punk, punchlines and disses, a seven-minute Afrobeat jam and a Yeat collaboration. Your complete affair is a 60-minute soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic movie of the identical identify, with a trailer that appears like a combo of The Street, Annihilation and Jurassic Park. The way in which concepts, friends, sounds and genres work together on right here is paying homage to Kendrick Lamar’s curation work on Black Panther: The Album. The distinction is that Gambino doesn’t decide his favourite artists, he simply does it himself. 

When it really works, he can nonetheless cook dinner up one thing masterful. The minimal noise-rap of opener “H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥” is a headbanger that sizzles like Kanye West’s Yeezus.“Obtained to Be” begins in a drunken stupor after which dives into the moshpit and the Matrix, a banger constructed from confirmed bangers by the Prodigy and Luke. He enlists vibe-merchants Khangrubin for a chill piece of Afro-Brazilian haze (“Blissful Survival”) and will get Kamasi Washington to play the Fela position for the album spotlight “No Excuses,” a sprawling mixture of vocodered neo-soul, exotica textures, afrobeat rhythms and the BaBenzélé pygmy whistle sounds made well-known by Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters. “Can You Really feel Me,” a duet together with his oldest son, Legend, is brilliantly constructed on Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s beautiful, endlessly listenable rendition of “The ABC Tune” from a late-Eighties episode of Sesame Avenue. 

Nevertheless, a few of Gambino’s concepts would have been higher served if he simply employed Weezer or Pusha T to ship them. His pop-rock songs (“Lithonia,” “Actual Love,” “Operating Round”) are overproduced and emo-fried into oblivion — the latter feels like Fall Out Boy overlaying Bon Jovi’s “Runaway.” He will get into battle rap mode on “Survive” and “Yoshinoya.” Followers appear satisfied the photographs are geared toward Drake, however after the nuclear dismantling of Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” the thought of parsing toothless sub-Tweets (“Fuck with my children, you fuck along with your life/You fuckin’ these hoes, I’m fuckin’ my spouse”) feels particularly unappealing. 

Regardless of all of the shape-shifting, you get the sensation that the actual Infantile Gambino simply needs to be Donald Glover, whether or not which means singing “I ain’t present as much as the Grammy’s/I’d reasonably be with my household” (“Can You Really feel Me”) or simply celebrating their holidays in Nantucket (“Steps Seashore”). Even when the exploratory Bando Stone doesn’t get Glover one other Grammy and Quantity One for the highway, you’ll be able to inform he’s strolling away comfortable, fulfilled and not infantile.