Deep Cover.

 
Words.

"...Thank Me Later (2010) was a record that slowly burned its way into my heart despite my not really liking Drake all that much. This is largely because Drake is (was?) a brilliant executive producer. The pacing, guest appearances, and production on Thank Me Later are objectively staggering, and if you don’t think “Fancy” is one of the most fun rap singles of the last half-decade, we probably can’t get drunk together. Take Care, by comparison, is a distillation and expansion of the Drake-ness that was employed with restraint on Thank Me Later. Many of the tracks here sound like less poignant approximations of the muted languor of “The Resistance,” which is one of my very favorite tracks on Later. But that concept blown panoramic? One can only produce so many variations on a theme before they cease to be variations. I like opening tracks like “Over My Dead Body” and “Take Care” a lot, but some six or seven songs in, when Take Care starts to sound like a dismal echo of the preceding thirty minutes, my interest wanes.


The only decidedly un-Drake aspect of Take Care is the curious inclusion of “Practice”—a sorta-reintepretation of “Back That Azz Up” on which Drake sounds like Will Ferrell doing Robert Goulet doing Juvenile—as a closer. The sequencing on Drake’s projects is usually impeccable. Here, he seems to provide us with an ideal closing number in “Look What You’ve Done” before tacking on a pretty good Weezy collab on “HYFR (Hell Yeah Fuckin’ Right)” and a peculiar old-school Cash Money ode.

But I return to the thesis: this is the Drakest record in existence..."

COKEMACHINEGLOW: Drake - Take Care. A Review.