Review Summary: Take your garbage album back
Judah and the Lion are not the first band to cross indie pop and folk. It's been done
plenty of times before; Mumford and Sons, Cage the Elephant, Noah and the Whale all being examples of this. But Judah and the Lion have decided to take things a step further, crossing "indie folk" with
hip-hop music. Does this sound like a disaster to you？ Well, the sound you have probably crafted in your head through that description is probably much better than what
Folk Hop 'n' Roll sounds like, because it's just...god, where do I start？
Well, i'm just going to be blunt:
Folk Hop 'n' Roll is one of the worst albums ever made. Vocalist Judah Akers sounds like Dan Reynolds crossed with a hammered narwhal with absolutely no range whatsoever, and his rapping skills are completely
horrendous. His backing band aren't all that competent either; Brian Macdonald and Nate Zuercher can only play the same song over and over again, while drummer Spencer Cross feels like a non-factor here because the only drum tracks sound like digital failures in FL Studio demo version production. The band's stab at hip-hop turns this from a laughably bad disasterpiece that you use to play mediocre pranks on your friends into the soundtrack of your nightmares; think of Billie Eilish mixed with XXXTentacion, only the producers are even
more incompetent to the point where not even XXXTentacion's low standards would allow this to get commercially released. The lyrics？ They might actually be the worst part of
Folk Hop 'n' Roll: in "Take It All Back" it can basically be chalked down to Akers rapping "You know I'd take it all back, take it all back, take it all back / I'd take it all back just to have you". If that's not bad enough, the lyrical content of "Reputation" is literally what would happen if you mixed a pop-punk version of Hinder with whatever generic 2000's MySpace scene metalcore band that hates their parents, only they've inverted it because "good vibes", y'know？:
Six o'clock I put my new clothes on
I wanna look nice so I don't upset my mom
So I got my hair parted to the side
Shirt smellin' like the mall
I get to school, hop out of the van
I wanna look cool to impress my friends
Hey!
It's funny how life still feels like a middle school dance
I wish I could tell you that
Folk Hop 'n' Roll is just a spectacular failure in satire, but perhaps the most disturbing part about the album is that it's
real. This is actually the mindset of Judah and the Lion, which is virtually just taking the worst qualities of Billie Eilish, Mumford and Sons, Brokencyde, Imagine Dragons and XXXTentacion as a whole, amping them up to eleven and spilling even
worse lyrics on them, and I find that as an insult to all five of those guys because not even any of them would dare put their name on this.
Folk Hop 'n' Roll is real, very real, and it has broken me.
Run away. Just run—
far away.
