Review Summary: pop punk demon
The perception of
Machine Gun Kelly has warped so much in the past two years. He had the media creaming all over him with the now-infamous Eminem diss track "Rap Devil". Then when Eminem fired back and he replied by releasing
Binge, he was reduced to such a laughing stock that he straight up changed genres almost overnight, ultimately leading to the
insanely forgettable
Hotel Diablo. Throughout all of this, MGK has found a blooming professional relationship with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker; I don't know exactly what the hell is going on, but MGK and Barker have dropped the pop punk monstrosity that is
Tickets To My Downfall, which is very much an alien of an album, and it both succeeds and fails miserably in many places.
First off, MGK is
not a very good singer. His tone is equivelant to that of both Bastille's Dan Smith and Buried In Verona's Brett Anderson, but it's completely devoid of everything else that made Smith and Anderson good and he's drenched in auto-tune to make himself not sound completely tone-deaf: while said auto-tune does a pretty good job at making him bearable most of the time, there are moments when the wheels fall off, most notably in "Drunk Face" and "WWIII" where he sounds like the unholy Frankensteined mutation of Smith, Anderson and fellow tone-deaf singer Dahvie Vanity. Kelly certainly lacks in the lyrical department as well: "Kiss Kiss" features the absurdly laughable chorus of "Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss the bottle all night" repeated three times, followed by "Get gone, get gone", while "Bloody Valentine" has him sing "In my head, in my head / I couldn't hear anything you said, but / In my head, in my head / I'm callin' you "girlfriend," what the f**k?" completely seriously; plenty of scene musicians are known for terrible lyrics, but stuff like this makes Oliver Sykes seem like a master wordsmith. "All I Know" features Trippie Redd adding literally nothing of any actual value, and "WWIII" tries to be a silly Blink-182 style joke song while lacking any of the charm that made Blink's comedy output work; just like both of the interludes and all the studio babble present within the album, it should have just been cut entirely.
However,
Tickets To My Downfall does have its moments of greatness, and
a lot of the tracks here, even the ones bogged down by the worst lyricism on the album such as "Kiss Kiss", are
incredibly catchy. Meanwhile, Halsey drops in
desperately trying to ape Hayley Williams on "Forget Me Too" and instead ends up sounding what Tonight Alive singer Jenna McDougall would likely resemble vocally after getting
utterly wasted; bizarrely enough, it's actually pretty charming; her voice fits the style way more than Kelly does and it's a far cry from her previous collaborations that only served to add to the mountains of evidence that she kills songs merely by existing. "My Ex's Best Friend" sees MGK seamlessly mix in pop punk and hip-hop with a solid guest appearance from fellow rapper/singer Blackbear, who's inclusion actually improves the song with a genuinely good rap verse. Unfortunately, "Play This When I'm Gone" closes out
Tickets To My Downfall on a note of mediocrity; while it isn't exactly terrible, it
feels like a sped-up bootleg of Breathe Carolina's "Rescue" whilist not actually ripping the song off, and it just leaves a bizarre taste in the listener's mouth.
The production on
Tickets To My Downfall is
incredibly hit or miss. While the audible bass is something that's very welcome, and while it's also completely understandable that Barker would like to emulate Jerry Finn's production, he simultaneously does nothing to distinguish himself from Finn and fails to understand what made Finn's production so wonderful. It certainly isn't badly clipped, but it's definitely brickwalled, which is unfortunately something to be expected from a mainstream release such as this. At the end of it all, I have no idea whether or not to give
Tickets To My Downfall a full seal of approval. MGK has given us a pretty solid release in the musical department, but at the same time there are so many flaws present that takes an album that could theoretically be great and severely bogs it down. If you're interested in hearing a mainstream rapper try something different or if you're a hardcore pop punk fan, then you might find something to enjoy on
Tickets To My Downfall, but if you aren't already sold on MGK this will likely do nothing but make your opinion of him worse.
