Review Summary: margaritaville 2017
As someone who spent summers at the pool as a kid, chlorine is one of the most beautiful scents in the world. It conjures sunny days of childhood bliss and delivered pizzas, birthday parties and nights of skinny dipping with friends, praying for that cute classmate to somehow show up out of the blue. Oliver Francis' "Chlorine" updates that childhood bliss to twenty-somethinghood bliss; you and all your friends are out for summer vacation and you've really hit it off with this one beautiful shy college student your friendgroup is mingling with. You take a lot of long walks together on the beach at night, passing a blunt back and forth and watching the stars ripple reflected in the ocean. In the back of your mind, you know the whole thing's a bit of a cliche, but it doesn't matter because it all feels so damn beautiful.
So yeah, you could call Oliver Francis' sound - a combination of Drake at his most pop and sadboy rap at its least sad - weightless and shallow. You could say that his raps, which revolve around girls and weed, hold nothing of lasting value. But it's hard to argue against the surface beauty of it all. Francis's smooth, glittering instrumentals and effortless flows hold incredible replay value given their immediate appeal. It's in such a context that Francis' other favorite lyrical topic - his grind as a self-produced, independent rapper - begins to click. Francis' music works because so much care has been put into making it all sound as effortless as possible. "They say that all I rap about is Bathing Ape and smoking weed," raps Oliver on "Nothing Gold Can Stay." "But last year, that shhit was just a dream to me." Chlorine invites the listener into the moment where all the work has been put in and all that's left to do is kick back, enjoy life and breathe. It's not such a bad place to be.
