Music Reviews

My personal expirience with X’s music is rather mixed – I found his debut studio album „17“ to be really blunt and melodramatic and I can’t really say I enjoyed his second album „?“ either, even though there was a more genre variety and experimentation going on, especially in the realms of emo and rock music, but a lot of those experiment just fell flat on their face. Still though, the legacy that X has left upon his passing is undeniable and the impact his music had too – therefore it’s a shame, that this new posthumous record over here, is taking such a big dump on X’s legacy. When I was going into this, I already didn’t have my hopes up, concidering what the label decided to do with the man’s last posthumous LP „Skins“, but on that record I can at least say that it sounded like something X would make – it still sounded like an XXXTentacion album for the very least. What happens on Bad Vibes Forever is more sad then anything – the label just trying to squeeze every last penny out of the man’s name. This album is essentially a compilation of 25 cuts, all of which have X’s demo-ish poorly recorded old vocals or literally just a few vocal lines, mixed with a trap or an accoustic beat and some feature slapped onto it. Not only does it come off as extremely lazy, but also extremrely ignorant to the man’s passing – I can guarantee you, that if X was still alive, he wouldn’t have wanted any of this. But more then anything, it just doesn’t feel like an XXXTentacion album at all – just because you can release something like this doesn’t mean you should. Anyway, let’s take a closer look on some of the tracks, shall we?

The whole thing kicks off with another introduction, as expected from an XXXTentacion album – and even though I admire the message in this one, I can’t get behind how tounge and cheek and melodramatic it sounds. The following track „Ex Bitch“ is one of the few tracks here that I actually like and that resemble some sort of effort in them – the nice accoustic beat goes pretty well with X’s dramatic yet powerful voice, and it all just comes together pretty nicely. But it’s pretty much downhill from here – half of the songs just sound like unfinnished demos, the feature are most of the time really out of place and unfitting and the overuse of accoustic beats in the first half of the album is actually kinda insulting. The title track is your typical melodramatic accoustic love ballad, the Lil Wayne song „school shooters“ has some of the worst and most trying-to-be-deep lyrics I’ve heard this year and the Noah Cyrus song „Ecstacy“ as whole is just extraordinarily bad – like seriously, why is this the longest song on here? The song „I Changed Her Life“ featuring Rick Ross (again, why is Rick Ross doing a feature on a XXXTentacion album?) has actually some quite nice synth-driven production to it, but is overall just really fogetable – as most of the album anyway. The song „LIMBO“ has some big potential at first – I love Killstation’s appearence on here, he absolutely destroys his verse – but is in the end completely destroyed by the weird beat-switch, if you can even call it that, in the middle of the track. I can kinda see what they were going for there, but it just ruins the song in my opinion – again, another lazy and poor decision. One of the worst songs here has to be „Hot Dyal“ though – why in the world would we want a spanish Despacito-like pop song on an album like this is beyond me. On the other hand the song „Daemons“ offers a nice change of pace, with its very lo-fi and moody aesthetic and Joey Bada$$ is one of the features, that actually makes sense here. I quite enjoyed the introspective lyricism, that for once didn’t come of as corny or too melodramatic. The song „Eat It Up“ ruins all of that though, with it’s borderline unlistenable vocal melodies, that sound like if X was trying to do a Travis Scott impression at 3 AM and without the autotune. „Hearteater“ could’ve actually been a fine song, if it wasn’t for the absolutely horrendous guitar „solo“ in the middle – excuse me, but have you ever heard a guitar solo before? And the harmonizing on this one is also just something else – if it weren’t for the rest of the instrumentation kinda carrying the rest of the song, then it would be an instant skip. The album throws at us another cornball of a song before it finnishes, with the song „NorthStar“, which was already a bad song to begin with, but when Joyner Lucas came in starting doing his gotta-rap-fast flows, that ultimately say absolutely nothing, then the song was just in complete shambless. The closing track „IT’S ALL FADING TO BLACK“ for some unexplainable reason features the pop punk act Blink-182, which is out of all those features, I have already listed, probably the least fitting one – like in what universe is Blink-182 an apropriatte feature on a XXXTentacion song? Anyways, the song itself is a complete throwaway – it has some on-the-surface intresting ideas it goes through, but is ultimately just boring, even though it tries to be super climacitic and inspirational.

So yeah, this was „Bad Vibes Forever“ by The Label. In all honesty though, this thing was just horrendous, but more then that, it’s just sad what is being done with X’s legacy – how can you possibly realease something like this under the name of a deceased artist, as that artist’s label, is something I will never understand – this is genuinely some of the worst music that has entered my ears this year and the context of all of this makes it just ten times worse.

strong 1/10