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The hook is still full of platitudes and a not-so-productive tautology, but as a whole it’s better than everything else here. "Fiddle Me This" caps off the album with a rote "Devil Went Down to Georgia" interpolation bleeding into a gratuitous scratching interlude, and Yelawolf raps, "Yeah, I've done come a long way." Like the rest of the album though, there doesn't seem to be much to show for the journey, and Yelawolf sounds like he's just going through the motions instead of actually covering ground.* Click here to go back to the beginning of the countdown*īefore I get into this, I have to say that I have not heard the original Trunk Muzik mixtape, so I can’t compare this one to the original (I know, I’ve been sleeping). Yelawolf doesn’t strain his singing here and settles into a marching flow over the looped-up acoustic guitar and heel-stomping bottom end. The WillPower produced "Till It’s Gone", a single released last year that found a place during a plot climax on the FX show "Sons of Anarchy", feels like the best the album has to offer. Em’s fingerprints are all over the music and his own production credits yield plodding, heavy-handed beats that don’t suit Yelawolf’s once-erratic flow. Once it all fits, it’s hard to see what the point was.Īs both an executive producer and label-head, Love Story signals a failure for Eminem as well, and bears the same structural flaws that nag his own late-career output-namely, a lot of filler, poor sequencing, and just too much of the same damn thing.
#Yelawolf albums and mixtapes series#
At one point he strings together a series of bars that internally carry "shiggy-shock" and "im-piggy-possible" and ends with, "word to the diggy doc/ Stiggy-stopping is not an option." It’s like Eminem is breaking down a complicated piece of Ikea furniture and purposefully veering away from the instructions in putting it back together. The appearance is the first we’ve heard from Em in 2015 and it’s a characteristically jumbled bit of technical braggadocio.
![yelawolf albums and mixtapes yelawolf albums and mixtapes](https://www.shadyrecords.com/files/2013/01/yela.png)
At surface level at least, "Best Friend" is the album’s attention-grabber with the solitary feature in the form of an extended, rambling Eminem verse. "Johnny Cash" features the rapper narrating his arms-length relationship with a live audience and then for a hook he just says "Johnny Cash" like half-a-dozen times. In either case, they cast Yela as a cheesy pastiche artist. Sometimes that means thigh-slapping, rootsy country ("Have a Great Flight") and sometimes it’s psychedelic southern rock. Love Story has moments that seem to aim at Americana. On "Disappear" he feigns a cathartic letter to an estranged father-"You told me what you did, carpentry, right?"-and then at the end of the song a supposed-to-be-big reveal falls hopelessly flat: "I love you daddy, or should I say Christ?" "Still on that grass like John Deeres," he raps on "Whiskey in a Bottle" on "Love Story", he offers "Got my weight up like I’m carrying fat people." Here he is denouncing wannabe rednecks on "Change": "Yellin' redneck, you about as red as the color blue is." Those types of lines not only sound worse the second (and third) time around, they run rampant. Most glaring is Yelawolf’s devolution as a rapper: He’s developed a bad habit of leaning on cringey similes and seems to have forfeited the snappy, accelatory delivery that made 0-60 so fun to listen to and hard to rap along with. With 18 tracks spanning more than 74 minutes, Love Story is far too long to accomplish so little and hits the same notes over and over again. Even worse, this new project seems to cement a damning new identity for Yela: once-compelling mixtape artist, shoddy album-maker.
![yelawolf albums and mixtapes yelawolf albums and mixtapes](https://cdn2.albumoftheyear.org/200x/album/131353-psycho-white.jpg)
Unfortunately, and for different reasons, Love Story vies with that last album as the worst music of his career as a result, it’s also getting harder to remember the gritty luster of his peak. When Radioactive rolled around in 2011 it felt like Yelawolf had broken a promise, or at least lost himself, in failed (and weird) crossover attempts.