Similar to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Kamaiyah’s A Good Night in the Ghetto, the title of Houston rapper Travis Scott’s latest album, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, sounds more like a work of American literature than a rap album. It’s a clever blend of drug slang and poetic grandeur, based on a Quavo line honoring 90s R&B icon Brian McKnight. And while it’s not exactly the type of name you’d expect for a Travis Scott album, it fits the record’s mixture of lowbrow trap music and Scott’s penchant for clearly defined aesthetics.
If the critical acclaim and commercial success garnered by last year’s Rodeo, Scott’s debut studio album, didn’t convince you of the 24-year-old’s place in the rap industry, Birds seeks to. The album boasts features from Kendrick Lamar, Andre 3000 and Kid Cudi, who all, unexpectedly, sound at home on Scott’s dark, grimy and, at times, theatrical brand of southern rap.
While earlier Travis Scott songs often featured mediocre rap verses, Birds forgoes the possibility of lackluster raps by removing them completely. The album’s 14 tracks rely completely on Scott’s deep, auto-tuned melodies to carry the songs. Birds is still clearly a rap album, but a rap album with minimal rapping.
Album opener “the ends” offers a menacing instrumental and crooned vocals that build before culminating in an intense Andre 3000 verse recounting his experiences as a kid during the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979-81. In some ways, the Andre 3000 verse is indicative of Scott’s greatest strength on Birds: He has the ability to paint vast, atmospheric soundscapes, purveying moods rather than stories. So when storytellers like Andre or Kendrick Lamar — who appears on the love track “goosebumps” — show up, their presence catapults the tracks into more accessible, interesting narrative pieces.
Fortunately, Scott’s music (even sans features), is engaging, enjoyable and hooky enough to make it worth the listen. Almost every track has a sing-songy hook guaranteed to have you downloading a terrible T-Pain app for a more realistic sing-along session. Singles “wonderful” and “pick up the phone” remain amongst the catchiest tracks of the summer, and new album cuts “coordinate” and “outside” are tracks meant to played in the Uber to the club, the club and the Uber back home.
But perhaps the album’s most successful experiment is the Kid Cudi-starring “through the late night,” a catchy jaunt through Cudi’s mid-2000s psych-rap territory that slickly interpolates his 2009 hit “Day ‘N’ Night” and features Cudi’s most tolerable vocal performance in years, even if his lyrics are straight out of the notebook of a kid in high school who loved drugs, chemistry and English class.
“N, N-Dimethyltryptamine and Lysergic acid diethylamide/ The vibes are effervescent, delicious, just how they should be,” he sings through the same auto-tune that Scott uses.
Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight is an impressive experiment in how mood can carry music. The beats are dark, the vocals are distorted and warped but, somehow, it still manages to be a catchy, enjoyable collection of work. Its highs don’t reach the peaks of Rodeo‘s signature party anthem “Antidote” or the epic, almost eight-minute “3500,” but Birds is a cohesive 2016 rap album, even if it’s not the modern classic its title hints at.
