Drake

Scorpion

This is a record in limbo, a behemoth crippled by a well-timed shot to the leg.

For all the hype and drama that led up to Scorpion's release and for want of a better cliche: it really doesn’t have much of a sting in its tail.

Veering from swaggering soul to eerie electronica, this new mega-album is bloated, rambling – yet frequently gorgeous and funny.

More Life featured a coterie of rising stars and rap heavyweights to create a largely jovial and party-like atmosphere, but Scorpion — Drake’s loneliest-sounding album since 2013’s ruminative Nothing Was the Same — is pure and uncut ego, cranking his hardest-to-like personality traits up to 11.

Unsurprisingly, his charm has worn thin. What’s left without it is a body of work that is self-indulgent, largely evasive, and frankly boring when the beat is not quite strong enough to steady the ship.

There are good tracks here, about 35 minutes’ worth, and the plus side of streaming is it’s easier to isolate the songs you like. But between the sprawl of Scorpion and the concision of Daytona, it’s clear Pusha T’s won the battle and the war.

Scorpion continues Drake's streak of projects that have been padded out to oblivion.

Scorpion doesn't even come close to being one of his best; instead, it's a one-trick record stretched out into 25 endless tracks by an artist who's so deep into the self-obsessed, self-pitying rut he created for himself that he can't see daylight anymore.

Scorpion is not the product of a man undergoing any meaningful personal change; it is the standard, biannual output of the cultural entity that is Drake, with two or three tracks tacked on to give it a sense of time and place, one that necessarily but reluctantly includes its creator’s catastrophic return to Earth.