T-Pain's mature attempt

T-Pain made a huge splash in the music industry back in 2005 with a couple of his singles and acquired a good reputation since then. At least this is what eight hundred thousands of sold copies of his debut album Rappa Ternt Sanga speak about. Therefore let's not cast doubts on gifts of this young performer and say at once, his sophomore album Epiphany is quite a worthy continuation of a bright start. In one of his interviews T-Pain stated that this album is the more mature attempt and that it is not following the current trend in music. Actually, this claim doesn't look like something you would never believe – T-Pain sounds pretty destinctive among other R&B performers. His songs have a little bit harder edge then the tradittional R&B/hip-hop mainstream of today and he frequently uses vocoder for his vocals at that, which is really uncharecteristic for this genre. However, saying that the new album has nothing to do with the music trends T-Pain exagerrates a little of course. The term R&B is quite suitable for Euphany in both music and lyrics, which have all the tradittional mainstream traits yet not without specific peculiarities.

Epiphany offers great songs and firstclass sound

T-Pain opens the album with a couple of neatly pronounced explanations: "Epiphany, definition one: the manifestation of a supernatural being" and "definition two: a sudden moment of insight or revelation". Judging to all appearances the idea of the album's title was inspired by a second one, calling himself a supernatural being, even in a musical sense, would be too much for this stylish and self consistent singing seducer. T-Pain continues this demonstration of his love to dictionaries with a pretty powerful, mid tempo track Tallahassee Love, convincing everyone that he persanly had a moment of creative insight. Here T-Pain raps mostly all the time and comes down to singing only in a short chorus, overall, this song sounds quite solid. The next song Church is this album's third single, T-Pain raps here again to an up tempo beat, sounds really lively and bouncy, however the song doesn't really differ from the previous one. The other album's singles are Bartender and Buy U A Drunk (Shawty Snappin) on which T-Pain comes as a singer at his best. He is accompinied by Akon on Bartender, which is a nice R&B club ballad featuring T-Pain's vocoder phrases. Buy U A Drunk (Shawty Snappin) is definetely the best track on the entire album, its slow vibe and hot atmosphere will make any club music lover simply happy.

R&B is the music for a good time and fun

There is a couple of tracks that need special mentioning. I Got It and Suicide are tied together with a common subject matter, which is pretty serious and uncharacteristic for R&B songs. I Got It delivers a staging of a dialogue between T-Pain and his girlfriend who tells him that she's got HIV. And the following ballad Suicide continues this topic. It all sounds completely unhappy and pretty serious, so those who feel skeptical about T-Pain will fail in making acid remarks about his creative works here. But they will have a chance to jeer at his lyrics on other songs in plenty. Honestly speaking, lyrics are not T-Pain's best part. The following lines are pretty exemplifying: "Baby Girl/Whats Your Name/Let Me Talk To You/Let Me Buy You A Drink/I'm T-Pain, You Know Me" or a masterpiece part from Bartender: "Oh she made us drinks, to drink/We drunk 'em, got drunk". However, this won't be an obstacle for Epiphany on its mainstream way, the album will be definitely a successful one and will stay in the upper chart lines for a long time. After all R&B is the music for a good time and fun, not for deep thoughts. The signature electro soul sound and R&B heat, this as what drives not only this album's singles but also the piles of other songs here.

21.06.2007