When talking about Justin Bieber, one may think his works have a lot of meaningless love songs, a few over-sexual, trap-influenced tracks and some shallow ballads.
They’re not wrong. “Change,” Bieber’s fifth studio album, follows just that stigma. More than a decade into his career, Bieber still does the same things, and it’s getting extremely tiring.
To promote the album, Bieber released a 10-episode documentary to talk about his struggles and how he’s a changed and improved man.
However, it’s hard to believe the integrity of his story when the lead single, “Yummy,” is a repetitive, uncreative and desperate attempt to talk about his new wife.
From then, almost all the songs have lyrics that are either cheesy or unnecessary details of the Biebers’ sex life.
As if the solo version is not enough, Bieber ends the album by plugging the remix version of “Yummy” featuring Summer Walker. The result? It’s just as bad.
With 17 tracks average of three minutes per song, Bieber makes it very obvious that he’s striking for a streaming hit.
None of the tracks sound like a radio hit, but Bieber’s demographic has almost shifted entirely to streaming services, and the songs in this album cater to playlists perfectly.
They’re short with trap beats, monotonous and nothing special. Once these songs are put on shuffle in the background, listeners will not even remember what they just heard, then Bieber and his team will earn revenue from that.
Instead of taking a risk, Bieber decided to stick with his long-time collaborator, Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd. In this project, Boyd completely missed the mark sonically.
Bieber’s vocals are heavenly, especially on softer productions. However, the missing ad-libs in almost all the songs are questionable. While Boyd could have asked Bieber to record different versions and then layered his vocals to create powerful effects, he didn’t.
Bieber may have changed, but it is a regressive one. With a monotonous production style, unused Bieber’s potential and horrible lyrics, this album may just have become Bieber’s career-killer.
