Album Review: BOOTS - Aquaria
By Nichole Moorman, Contributor
[Columbia; 2015]
Rating: 3.5/5
Key Tracks: “AQUARIA,” “Only”
BOOTS, the singer, rapper and producer largely responsible for the more experimental sounds heard on Beyoncé’s critically acclaimed self-titled album, now has a new album of his own titled AQUARIA.
Boots’s production and lyrics are much more minimalist on AQUARIA than they would be on a more high-profile pop project such as Beyoncé--here, he’s singing without saying much. In “Only” he sings, “Clean the carpet stain / Sweep the past mistakes away / Shoot for 60 days / Shaping giants shaping up.” The song continues with a chorus of two repeated lines and a long section of adlibbing. The music is not bad, it’s actually listenable and attractive, but at the same time very low maintenance and hard to pinpoint. This is Boots expressing an alternative style in every sense of the word.
AQUARIA is riddled with the low hums of tracks like “Still” and “Only,” but thankfully the music expands farther than that at times. Led by a standout title track, the album’s best moments contain much more lively beats and clamors with lyrics to match: “Who make you look, who make you talk? / Who put your love in the gutter? / I mix you up, I let you off, I’ll make your heart stutter.”
This experimentation and variation of sounds is nothing new--Boots has explored many styles in the music he has released previously. On the 2014 song “Autumn (Lude 1)” Boots raps on a mellow boom-bap track featuring crooning vocals from singer Kelela. It has some of the same distortion-enveloped sounds from AQUARIA, but unlike the album, “Autumn” doesn’t sound as isolated and introverted. Looking back at all this, is seems as though what AQUARIA may be lacking after all is a second opinion.
AQUARIA shows that Boots is far different from what one would expect from Beyoncé’s producer--he can get far more experimental than that. But the minimalist direction he takes on AQUARIA doesn’t do much to differentiate his new material. In the end, it just makes more noise.
