Flo Rida
Wild Ones
Atlantic
***
Flo Rida's music is the equivalent of fast food: cheap, cheerful and convenient. However, those with a more discerning palate may find themselves wanting to opt out.
A Euro-friendly dance beat, a few mindless rap verses and uber-catchy (usually female) vocals on the chorus make up the winning trifecta of commercial gold that has allowed the American rapper to carve out a signature niche of urban-pop music in recent years.
Flo Rida's fourth studio album Wild Ones gives us the feel-good party anthems we have come to expect, and a bit more.
The album starts off strong with a string of well-known hits cleverly placed right at the beginning. The double-entendre singalong Whistle, the inescapable smash hit Wild Ones and the Nina Simone sampling Good Feeling have all already been embedded deep into our psyches despite the album only being released a few weeks ago. The future hits Let it Roll and I Cry also have all the necessary components of a Flo Rida smash.
It is interesting to note that Flo Rida is rarely the main attraction in his music. The infectious choruses of his songs command the most attention, while his rapping acts merely as a forgettable accompaniment. While bearable (and with some surprising moments of wit), his paint-by-numbers rap style can get very repetitive, and after a few listens his delivery begins to drag out and sound eerily the same in every song.
Thankfully, he manages to show us a different side on Thinking of You, a slow song lamenting a lost love. The dance-ballad sees him getting a bit more creative and witty with his wordplay, hinting that there might be more to him than the middle-aged club pest image lets on.
At times, the album's never-ending party vibe becomes repetitive and the magic just isn't there. The clichéd, innuendo-filled Jennifer Lopez collaboration Sweet Spot and the painfully generic sounding In My Mind Part 2 are tracks that let the album down.
Flo Rida's formulaic approach to hit-making certainly hasn't failed him yet in terms of success; in an era where both rap and dance music are wildly popular, he has ingeniously melded the two genres into single-serving, easy-to-digest doses that consistently dominate the charts.