Post Malone is the first to admit he doesn’t know when to stop. His fifth album – Austin – finds the 28-year-old rapper getting frank about his ongoing quest for the next drink, pill, car, thrill. But it’s a producer’s job to hold up that stop sign. Alas Austin’s main producers, Andrew Watt and Louis Bell, haven’t been able to get Posty to quit on an album that’s been allowed to sprawl on for 18, self-pitying pop-rock tracks. So, although this is a record that was clearly meant to find its star getting personal – using his birth name for a title and playing (often acoustic) guitar throughout – the emotional and melodic connection becomes too diluted to sustain a connection with the listener. You drift off the way you would listening to even your most fascinating friend repeating themselves on a drunken loop. Taxi for Posty!
This said, there’s good stuff on Austin. It opens with the tender “Don’t Understand”, on which Malone picks ruefully reverberating acoustic as he heads towards a catchy-sad chorus that runs: “I don’t understand how you like me so much/ Cos I don’t like myself.” The song is a terrific showcase for Malone’s vocals that tremble, stretch, yearn, scratch, soothe, ache, shiver and sigh through the raw self-loathing that counterpoints the pretty string arrangements. “Something Real” brings the stadium-sized synths and a walloping great humble-brag lament that the trappings of global pop celebrity can’t heal a sore soul. Who knew that sipping burgundy in the Maldives or wearing Prada underpants couldn’t make a man happy? Or that a philosophy of “throw a mil at it, throw a pill at it” wouldn’t solve his problems? Malone’s wordplay does bring some originality to the old story of the sorrowful celeb, though and there’s a neat moment where he references Beethoven’s “Für Elise” and then twists his own melody to echo the 17th-century semitones.
Sonically, Austin sees Malone moving away from the glitchy trap and hip-hop with which he made his name. Instead, he goes straight for the pop-rock formulae. This would have worked better over a shorter span, but yawning as it does on the same mid-tempo pacing means that tracks blur to filler and some good lines get lost in the sludge. The lack of guest vocalists doesn’t help either. Single “Chemical” lifts this pace and features a neat, sing-along-a-chorus of “Outside of the party, smokin’ in the car with you/ Seven Nation Army, fightin’ at the bar with you”. But it’s not all that interesting. Ditto “Sign Me Up” on which Malone vows to walk over dead bodies and join a cult for a girl, only to ditch her when she threatens to separate him from his true love: booze. “Green Thumb” is a quirkier acoustic number on which he also affirms that his one true love is, in fact, brandy. Although in a recent interview with Zane Lowe, Malone credited his fiancée and the mother of his infant daughter with helping him pull back from his bad habits.
I preferred the more arresting thud-squelch electronica of “Texas Tea”, although lyrically it delivers more of the woe-is-me rockstar stuff (“Baby wanna bone me/ record companies really tryna clone me”). And there’s a cool cruise to the sly R&B of “Speedometer”, which locks into a smooth Eighties AM radio gear with just a flicker of a strum slipped into the mix. There’s no question Malone can keep delivering the hooks. He just needs to stop slopping them out like pop’s free bar and concentrate on making fewer, more distinctly delicious cocktails.
