Take Care is a farewell to the up-and-coming mixtape Drizzy and the beginning of a 25-year-old veteran having full command of his verbal arsenal.
Drake, 40 and his rotating roster of guests try their damnedest to create a pop rap album that can compete with Kanye West’s monstrous My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
Drake's worked on his own technical abilities, too, and both his rapping and singing are better than ever here
With Take Care, Drake has his accelerated Kanye West moment — when a little too much ambition and all the asshole feelings he's got inside coalesce into an insular, indulgent, sad-sack hip-hop epic.
Take Care shines bright, utilizing the same concepts and notions as its predecessor but with far more lethal and appealing results.
He trumps his hitmaking mixtapes and fully commits through first proper foray into the album format with significant improvement
Take Care has the feel of a late-night R&B album, full of slow tempos, muted textures, impassioned crooning, and an introspective tone that is only rarely punctured by aggressive tracks, boasts, and/or come-ons.
'Take Care' is an affecting masterpiece easily on par with his debut.
Take Care is intriguing, filled with top-tier production and emotional lyrics.
Take Care is equal parts dick-waving egoism, emotional wreckage, and mature understanding.
Take Care is somber and mellow, cold but not unwelcoming. Its ethereal chords, delicate strings and subtle percussion provide a steady mood and tone that is both dense and structured.
It's an idiosyncratic, aggressively self-conscious and occasionally sentimental album, one that falls somewhere between languid, finger-snapping R&B and hip-hop braggadocio.
Like so many rap albums Take Care would greatly benefit from a cull of four or five songs.
Since Take Care is so similar to Thank Me Later in terms of texture and tone, Drake’s well-defined identity will read as repetition for some.
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.
Take Care is a record unsure of itself, certainly more focused and interesting than its predecessor, but still far from the classic Drake had hinted at.
Take Care presents itself as one overlong woozy monologue, with Drake constantly holding his hungover head and wondering where his life went.
Drake is insipid as a singer ... As a rapper, he is inert to the point of catatonia and his foregrounded voice becomes swiftly intolerable.
#2 | / | Stereogum |
#3 | / | Bigger Than The Sound |
#3 | / | Complex |
#5 | / | Billboard |
#7 | / | FACT Magazine |
#8 | / | Pazz and Jop |
#8 | / | Pitchfork |
#10 | / | Consequence of Sound |
#10 | / | Prefix |
#13 | / | A.V. Club |