Jack Harlow is an excellent rapper, yet an adequate singer. And four tracks into his latest album, Monica, I’m bored.
The release opens quite strong, I enjoyed Trade Places. It has a little more of Jack’s signature sound and excellent production, making me excited for the rest of the album. And for the first few tracks I figuratively can’t put it down. But then, it just goes nowhere. Every subsequent track is just more of the same. A lot of this is due to the point made in my opening sentence: Jack is not an excellent singer, and the result is the vocals aren’t dynamic enough to fully resonate with the emotional intentions, which leaves far too much hanging on the rest of the track.
The production is very much the album’s strength. At its best it’s some of the finest work you’ll ever hear but it can only take a song so far and it’s not enough to give each track a signature personality. It’s also not flawless – as an example, the drum hits on Against The Grain are jarring and they distract from the vocals (and not in a good way). At times, it feels like no one actually played the album on a regular speaker or headphones before sending it out into the world.
Move Along is another bright spot on the release. A duet with James Savage, this immediately added more interest, but it also has an infectious beat and some lovely layers which created an interesting track.
Sadly, subsequent track All Of My Friends returns to the album’s overall feel – which is somewhere between an overly dated Boyz II Men vibe and a forgettable Craig David album track. There are ways to bring back 90s/00s R n N but it’s not this. What’s a shame is closing track Say Hello is actually a great example of how to do this sound well. The luscious smooth track, the fall away in the vocals of the “say hello” parts of the song, and the jazzy elements all work really well together but by this point in the album it’s cluttered with everything else you’ve already heard which takes away a lot of its sparkle.
I do respect that he’s trying something different and it definitely teems with old school New York R n B (the album was recorded at Electric Lady Studios in the city), but for me it just didn’t work. Personally (if I were Jack Harlow), I would have released it as a duets album. As seen on Move Along, adding additional vocalists actually makes a huge difference and Jack has had considerable success with these sorts of tracks in the past. I also wouldn’t have moved completely away from rapping. One of the defining elements of a certain type of R n B back in the day was those 16 bar rap breaks in place of a bridge and doing something like this here could have utterly transformed the album, creating a valuable dynamic that is sadly missing. Maybe he can embrace the 00s hip-hop love of a good remix and Monica: the Remix Edition could take the potential that you can hear in many songs to that next level. In summary, the album makes me a little sad. I can see what he was trying to do, and the spark is there, but it just never really ignited into the album it could have.