Review Summary: A fiery disaster in the making.
When I wrote last year's review of Logic's "final" album, "No Pressure", I mentioned that in hip-hop, the game doesn't ever leave you, once you go big. The Maryland rapper's swan song of the time felt like a beautiful conclusion, to a career where his many haters alike have looked upon him as corny, the multiple biracial jokes, and putting on full tear on abysmal projects such as Supermarket. The game doesn't ever leave you, but in Logic's sudden return in his next installment of the Bobby Tarantino series? The game might as well have left him.
The first two installments of the Tarantino series prided itself on "turned-up, care-free, party rap", a step away from the conscious stuff done earlier in Under/No Pressure, among others. BT3 offers little of that, but its greatest flaw is the simplest component required of in anything music: effort. The lack of effort, especially so in the first half of this, is beyond criminal. It’s almost insulting how little attempt was put into some of these. It can be felt instantly in the unusually-titled "Vaccine", which feels more-so a sedative with its lazy hook, mindless lyrics, and the lack of fire felt in Logic's voice. It sounds like a cheapened version of his BT2 single “44 More”, just half-assed to the teeth. Or the poor-man’s version of his biggest radio hit single, 1-800, in the snoozer “Call Me”, wasting away an otherwise graceful, angelic beat.
Effort was already a question mark, but the sheer cringe that befell in projects such as Confessions and Supermarket also return in its most hellish, grotesque form. Logic pulls a G-Eazy "Stan By Me" in the dreadful "My Way", an attempt in pop-rap so bad, that it manages to outdo G-Eazy's own horror. The obvious auto-tune, the laughable hook, and just straight-up cringe worthy lines such as "bad b**** with me when I pull up in a Benz, that's my baby mama, ain't no drama, don't pretend". This easily crowns itself as the worst Logic track yet, and if Supermarket wasn't already awful enough, it manages to find itself a successor.
The only credits worth giving a damn to in Bobby Tarantino III, is the exceptional production from Logic's exclusive producer 6ix, and the boom-bap/trap hybrid, NP-throwaway "See You Space Cowboy". Cultivated from a previously unreleased track that hit the cutting block for No Pressure, it is the only enjoyable song that truly resembled anything BT-esque. But, it doesn't save face from the inevitable. BT3 comes away not just as the worst of the series, but its just a piss-poor disappointment. One glance at the spectacularly-ironic album art encapsulates the kind of disaster this is. With Logic's next and final album with Def Jam up next, hope is that it will close his career, the way it should've when his initial "last hurrah", No Pressure dropped. The right way.
