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.
