It seems that the more melancholy Morgan Wallen becomes, the more it succeeds. Over a few short but full years, he became the most important and most committed misery of pop – the contemporary star most concerned about failure, and the most skilful to transform it into something like beauty.
Unlike Drake, who is perhaps his closest analog, Wallen almost never lingers on his successes. He lives forever in space just beyond loving him and allowing himself to be loved. As a result, even its best and most engaging songs have a dark pallor that hovers just above them.
On “I am the problem”, his fourth album in a bad mood and melodramatic, Wallen is almost tirelessly. Women ruin him and whiskey saves him (by ruining him even more). Some representative moods: “I just want to love someone who does not want me to collapse”; “Each square thumb of this house is as messy as you left me”; “Too young to feel so old.”
It is tragic, worrying and very effective: “I am the problem” is already on the right track to become one of the most successful outings of the year. At 37 songs and almost two hours, it is a structural beast, emptying graphic fence data. But rather than using this large scale to explore different sound approaches, Wallen largely widens in several micronts of weariness.
“Kick me” deplores the only thing that a drug addict can never escape: himself. “Just in case,” tells a story to never let anyone get closer. “Jack and Jill”, a morbid song on a broken couple, recalls “whiskey lullaby”, the duo of Krauss de Brad-Aisley-Alison unbearably tragic of 2004.
