I know what all of you want me to do in this review. You're all waiting for the seething anger, the extended rant on the vapid nonsense that this duo passes off as party bangers, how both of their previous records have been among some of the worst hip-hop to be released in the 2010s...
And yet I can't do it this time. Look, I don't regret anything I said for either SremmLife 1 or 2 - they're both bad records crippled by grating lead performances, awful lyrics, and production that wants to substitute overweight murky lumps courtesy of Mike Will Made It for anything fun or with significant force - I've got nothing against party bangers, but when you can't match even mid-tier crunk from the 2000s, you have serious problems! But then 'Black Beatles' - unquestionably the best song Rae Sremmurd ever made - became a #1 hit, and then I started hearing Swae Lee refine his cracking, nasal delivery into something a little smoother, and Slim Jxmmi add a little more structure to his bars, and I came to the realization that I may have actually been a shade too hard on SremmLife 2 - it's still pretty bad, but there were improvements there that deserved more attention.
So okay, maybe the follow-up could rise to being passable, I told myself, maybe these kids had something in them... and instead of doubling down on a tight record of bangers, they decided a good idea was a triple album! Now I've said in the past that even double albums can be a dicey proposition, but three records from this duo - one from them together, and one each from them solo, called Swaecation and Jxmtro respectively - is the sort of overstuffed choice where I can count the number of times it's worked in the history of recorded music - outside of live albums and greatest hits collections - on two hands! Seriously, we've got Joanna Newsom, Smashing Pumpkins, Kamasi Washington, maybe the Magnetic Fields or Swans or Prince - it screams of overplaying their hand or at the very least misunderstanding their appeal for Rae Sremmurd to try this. And yet my Patrons wanted to put me through this, so fine: what did we get on SR3MM?
