I listen to an awful lot of music. So much so that I sometimes forget what I’ve heard before. B.o.B. is a guy who I admired for the brief time he was on the mixtape circuit (he got snatched up by the majors at a very young age), I think his first major release is incredible, but then he kind of dropped off for me. So when his new album dropped earlier this year with no hype at all, I picked it up out of curiosity but it didn’t interest me enough to listen to more than half of it. Then I found the single, “Back and Forth,” on Soundcloud and didn’t even remember having heard it before. Again, my first reaction was luke warm.
Well for some reason my iPhone threw Pyscadelic Thoughts back at me a few days ago and I was shocked. First, I wondered how new B.o.B. got on my playlist without me realizing it. Then it started to sound familiar. Very familiar. Then I got it.
Yeah, lots of rappers are doing the psychedelic thing these days. Chance the Rapper, A$AP Rocky, and tons more. But B.o.B. who has described this album as going back to his roots and his Bobby Ray persona, was doing it years ago–he just didn’t call it that.
B.o.B. has managed to create an album that sounds like his old stuff, without sounding dated. It’s mainstream without being tired.
It’s sounds an awful lot like Daft Punk, though.
