Revival Review

Everything about the construction is wrong. The beats chase a version of pop radio that had already moved on, guitar loops and stadium choruses sung by people with no connection to the songs they are attached to. The rhyming has degenerated into pun chains where each line exists only to set up a homophone, and the punchlines land with the sound of a man explaining a joke. Untouchable spends six minutes on race in America and manages to be both earnest and completely inert.

Walk on Water opens the album with him admitting he is scared of being finished, which is the most honest thing here and would be moving if the following seventy minutes did not prove the fear correct. The rapping is still technically fluent, which somehow makes it worse, because you can hear the machinery working with nothing to carry. Even the fans who defend everything else quietly leave this one alone.