Drake's Dear Diarizzy

At its worst moments, Drake’s debut, “Thank Me Later” sounded like an odd mess – appearances from big name guests were often misplaced over ill-fitting, snazzy production. Even Drake has called out his own debut since its release with the aspiration that he was vaguely “capable of more.” While “Later” arguably sounded like a rushed, big-label product, the album was better because of it – a snapshot of his whirlwind ascendance with an immediacy to boot. Drake’s confidence and craft were measured and sometimes even lacking, but that made it easy to empathize with the young Aubrey Graham, trying to reconcile his TV stardom with hip-hop culture.

“Take Care,” his sophomore LP, takes a definite step away from that subject matter and relishes in a sentiment more in line with the title – take care, fuck you, good riddance. Here, Drake creates something of a hip-hop opera that’s an ambitious sprawl of dimly lit tracks, chock full of lavish production and tremendous overstatement. This is, after all, the weird world of Drake, where drunk texts read like wedding vows, strippers are sirens in need of saving and your best friend is Lil Wayne.

But that world works well here for Drake. He steamrolls through the door of honesty rap that Kanye West so (in)famously opened with “808s and Heartbreak” three years ago, perfecting the rapper as a sometimes-brooding, sometimes-jaded lover/player. Everything about “Take Care” is intensely personal, starting with the recording process. Laid down entirely in his hometown Toronto, the album credits longtime collaborator Noah “40” Shebib on nearly every track; there’s also extensive help from another Toronto local, The Weeknd’s Able Tesfaye.

The LP constructs the perfect sonic wonderland for its mastermind, complete with cool, murky waves of synth, purposeful percussion and space – lots of space. Its construction testifies to Drake’s well-trained eye, crazy work ethic and honed craft. He has indisputably stepped up his rap technique, but the low-key numbers impress most, because, as a crooner, Drake has never been more on-point. He sidles from one broken romance to another, copy-pasting diary entries and maneuvering similar arrangements of trickling lounge piano, echoes and drums. “Look What You’ve Done” sounds like Drake’s version of  ‘Ye’s “Hey Mama,” a sensitive celebration of family and their role in his life. On the seedier yet still romantic side, Drake’s stripper complex comes to life on “The Real Her,” which features a song-stealing verse from Andre 3000. But even some of those R&B-influenced numbers are crippled by Drake’s earnestness and suffer from lines like “We live in a generation of/ Not being in love.”

Predictably, Drake makes rationalizing the overly personal with his affinity for hustler bravado very tricky. On one of two interludes, Kendrick Lamar out-Drakes Drake, delivering a lethal, cryptic verse on restlessness and fame that might be the album’s best, apart from 3 Stacks’. In fact, even though Drizzy’s technique has improved, his guest list kills him like a firing squad, making it more difficult to stomach his raps that are so reliant on self-aggrandizement.

It should make sense, then, that the album droops most noticeably when it attempts conventional hip-hop. Drake’s penchant for lyrical facepalms persists, with wordplay like “She says you’re such a dog/ I say you’re such a bone,” on “We’ll Be Fine,” which features Birdman, the only guest that doesn’t kill Drake. Instead, he literally shows up only to rustle money in the mic and assert Drake’s “gangster shit.” (Weren’t we past Drake and any notion of street cred?) Rick Ross verbally assaults the young emcee on “Lord Knows,” a huge, opulent Just Blaze beat with a live church choir sample that blows him away with lines like, “Only fat nigga in a sauna with Jews.” Even when Drake's lyricism works, the execution doesn’t, like on “Underground Kings,” when he uses the same flow over and over (and over). His best raps come on tracks like “Crew Love,” a groggy bout of syncopated percussion and wispy vocals. With a production assist from Tesfaye, Drake captures both drug-induced paranoia and euphoria at the same time. Those rhymes evoke the best sentiments of “Thank Me Later,” equal parts measured swagger and strung out youth.

So despite his unsurprising rap inconsistency, Drake’s attraction to introspective ballad-like material conceives brilliant efforts like the title track, a sexy, stilted duet with Rihanna that tweaks a Jamie XX sample of Gil-Scot Herron. As a whole, Drake leaves his rather noticeable fingerprints all over “Take Care,” reflecting his attention to detail and pure ambition. Although he sometimes pales next to his guests, “Care” succeeds on a near-brilliant level as a whole. It succeeds both because of Drake and, occasionally, in spite of him, resonating as a sprawling, ambitious musical narrative where the divide between Drake the rapper and Drake the artist has never been more apparent.