Joji - Nectar (Review)
Joji - Nectar (Review)
10/2/20
Ever since the release of "In Tongues", Joji has certainly made a name for himself within the music industry. Rising to fame from his YouTube comedy sketches under the name TVFilthyFrank, Joji has now fully branched away from this name. Since then, he has been putting all of his content-making effort into making indie emo-pop that has ranged from amazing to amazingly mediocre. On September 25th, he released an album that I've been pretty torn on. Not a bad album, necessarily, but it's hard to call anything here truly astounding. There are quite a decent handful of songs that are only mediocre at best. A couple of his singles along with the "Love Us Again" leak, even though that song never made it on the album, had me hyped. Though, it's hard to say whether Joji's new album lived up to said hype.
Starting off on the negative end, my first main gripe with this album is the kindredness this style can offer that comes through many of these songs. On Joji's first album "BALLADS 1", we saw a lot of unique tones and sounds from different songs that gave the album a very overarching feel. In "Nectar", however, these newer and more interesting tones are buried under a deep layer of stylistic oppression. The style is good at its core, and the album does have a very nice and distinct arch, but many of these songs just don't sound good enough. My next problem here lies in the unclear instrumental themes of the album. For instance, the album opens with a pretty decent, yet somewhat wannabe-artsy, pop ballad "Ew". It has this great orchestral tone that could've gone great with a lot of the electronically-driven tones on this album. This bleeds into one of my favorite tracks, "MODUS", but immediately fades away after this song. Next comes "Tick Tock", a song that I'm pretty sure was intended to be funny, but has a few emotional bars which throws me off; alas with no orchestral segments whatsoever. After this, we get a pretty mediocre EDM-infused single, and after this, the album's style finally picks up and starts to get itself. Though, the tones do keep changing, and it makes parts of this album a very confusing experience.
Despite the negatives, there are a lot of positives to be found in this album. Firstly, the style is great, and Joji pulls it off successfully, making the album a nice stylistically-influenced listening experience, rather than something more random. This style allows for breaks between catchy bops like "MODUS and intimate ballads like "Like You Do", and Joji uses this to his advantage in songwriting and production. Speaking of and production, it is executed beautifully within the album, though I could argue about the songwriting. Most of it ranges from pretty good to astounding, but sometimes it can swoop down below the midpoint and sometimes ruin the better half of an entire song. Getting back to the good qualities: this album is big. Big never instantly implies that an album is better, namely most of Chris Brown's discography, but in this case, the longer track list helps the album greatly. It feels like a twelve-track album like "BALLADS 1" would not have worked for this project and the grand feeling it wanted to achieve, which it pulled off in many points.
Going over a few of the perfectly mild points of this album; the features are very mediocre. There's nothing inherently bad about any of them, yet nothing at all to write home about. The most interesting thing in these features, and maybe even this whole album, was Lil Yachty making a verse in a toned-down 100 gecs style. The choppy and rave-like autotune debatably did not sound very good over his voice, but it was certainly interesting. Besides this, we were handed some pretty mediocre features, with some being good and some being bad. In conclusion, Joji's latest album "Nectar" falls on the latter half of his discography, though this does not in any way mean the album is all bad. Sure it has its handful of flaws, but there are many tracks and good points that many will be very excited to revisit many times again. My favorite track is "Gimme Love". It was my favorite track ever since it released officially, and has since stayed my favorite track because sadly, there wasn't enough in this album to knock my socks off and make me choose any song over this one. My least favorite track is "777"; I thought some of the sounds were interesting, at best, but the vocal performance and lyrics were very subpar. Giving this album a 1-10 using half numbers, I give this album a 7/10 with a five-word description of: "great, but not Joji's best".
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