A$AP Rocky

Testing

Testing is loud, frenetic, spastic, and about as vibrant as rap can be. The songs are busy, crowded with radiant instrumentation and stacked vocals, and rarely take time to breathe. It’s a welcome addition to a genre that has become so occupied with spacey, bare-bones operations and overly simplistic results.

A$AP Rocky has always been a tastemaker with an eclectic palette, and with his third studio album, Testing, he isn't catering to the ears of current hip-hop fans. Rocky is making music outside of the confines of rap while simultaneously pushing boundaries within it.

Overall, Testing seems to have been too much of a creative reach by ASAP Rocky. It results into a lack luster project torn between rapping and experimenting.

Rocky similarly hopped between styles on his two previous albums ... but Testing is a spottier affair. Too many tracks minimise his strengths.

Testing’s title might suggest experimentation, but it delivers more on tentativeness, with a smattering of solid songs mixed into aesthetically interesting but unresolved experiments.

For every bad track on this frustrating album, another one offers a distinctive flair and ability unlike anyone else. But, at least as far as making albums goes, Rocky has yet to take his place in the pantheon of hip-hop royalty. Testing is what it says it is, though this far into his career, he should be doing better than merely a passing grade.

While in some ways Testing is more musical than anything we've heard from A$AP Rocky before, it's also more confused, with ideas and musical shifts colliding at times to the point of randomness.

Testing contains some interesting ideas here and there, but they aren't performed or organized all that well a great deal of the time.