While the title track and pre-release had the lowest rating on this mini-album, the side tracks on READY TO BE really pulled through and boosted the mini-album to the high rating. I have checked my records and READY TO BE is my pick for the best TWICE album yet, earning the highest ‘Overall Album Rating’ ever for a TWICE album since I started reviewing TWICE’s albums in 2017 (I know, I have missed a few albums released prior to 2017). It also serves as the group’s first Korean album release since BETWEEN 1&2 from August of last year. Released back in March of this year, READY TO BE features the title track SET ME FREE (and the English version of the song), the all-English pre-release single MOONLIGHT SUNRISE and 4 additional side tracks. He should give those Nirvana songs another listen.Today’s album review is for TWICE’s 12th mini-album, READY TO BE. Even on an album named after himself, he submits to precious little self-examination, burying every moment of clarity in layers of chintz and cheap thrills. It’s nice to hear him finally match the intensity of the Austin’s first song, but it’s hard to buy the catharsis. The record’s triumphantly spiteful response to this development, “Laugh It Off,” erupts at its close with skyscraping post-rock guitars and digitized Bonham drums, with Post howling over the noise. The second person to whom many of these songs have been directed bails in the record’s final moments, unable or unwilling to serve as Post’s savior and redemption any longer. The immense self-loathing with which the record introduces itself finds no clear resolution by the end, despite many allusions on otherwise-peppy songs. They’re largely fine songs, and clever, but lighter than Post seems to want them to be. Almost every track finds Post in some tortured posture like this, singing cheerily into a bottle he’s doomed to finish. Post remains a largely shameless lyricist, but the album’s monomaniacal focus on alcohol and its aftereffects inspires the sort of gallows humor familiar to church undercrofts everywhere: “Mourning” is built around a central image of a drunk throwing his bottle at the sky because he’s mad at god for letting morning come. The starburst hook of “Enough Is Enough” is endearingly Toto-esque, and “Novacandy” is a case study in charismatic self-destruction, containing some of the record’s best, bleakest lines (“Put on my old coat and found new drugs / I wanna thank young me for getting me fucked up”). It shakes like a wounded animal that might still bite your hand off. His voice - capable of arena-rock roars and tender falsettos but more often wandering between these poles, seething and uncertain - has never sounded better or more purposeful than it does here. Plainspoken lines like, “I don’t understand why you like me so much / ‘Cause I don’t like myself” don’t read like much on paper, but his delivery sells it. Album opener “Don’t Understand” is an absolute disembowelment, its oblong chords creating a scaffolding across which Post stretches that gut-wrenching quiver of a voice. Its first track makes good on this promise. This suggests a more naked release, with the honesty and vulnerability of the rock music he has long revered. Guitars feature on every track of his fifth LP Austin, which takes its name after the one on Post’s birth certificate. The recipe works: he has sold a zillion albums and earned 10 Grammy nominations. Across four wildly successful, algorithm-swallowing LPs, he has wrangled Ozzy Ozbourne, Fleet Foxes and Father John Misty into his signature post-genre gumbo, equal parts mumble-rap and groan-rock, pickup-country and minivan-funk. He has Bob Dylan tattooed on his arm, and did a Nirvana cover set so good it earned Dave Grohl’s approval. Early in his career, he expressed ambivalence toward the melancholic hip-hop that made him famous. Post Malone has long threatened to make a guitar record.
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