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Review: Future Brown – Future Brown

★☆☆☆☆

One star

With a paper shredder, complete texts go in and incoherent fragments come out. That’s the best way to think about Future Brown’s self-titled album. With Future Brown, the laziest, most tired remnants of mid-2000s hip hop go in and an incoherent mangle comes out.

The ‘super’ group is comprised of Fatima Al-Qadiri, J-Cush, Asma Maroof, and Daniel Pineda. I can’t say for sure what their respective credentials were to warrant their claim to super group(dom). But from the sounds of the album it’s probably a semi-stoned recollection of Jay Z’s albums from ten years ago.

‘Room 302’ opens the album with a semi-rhythmic drone of auto-tuned vocal jabbering and ringtones. Hopes of the resourcefulness we were promised are swiftly dashed. ‘Talkin Bandz’ has our imaginative vocalists resort to the lyric, “She sells sea shells on the sea shore.” The album continues as an inane mass of endlessly looped vocals. After 20 repetitions of the same line, I’m unsure of what they’re actually singing about, but, frankly, I don’t care.

As the album progresses, negligible variation is introduced by bringing in rappers who sing in different languages. This makes for a welcome change from the usual drone and is indeed one of the few highlights of the album. In fact, this addition might be the only saving grace in an otherwise boring, derivative, and pointless album.

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