Review: Chris Brown’s Indigo Is a Bloated, Incoherent Personal Statement

The album’s lumbering pace and homogeneity overshadow even its few gems.

IndigoOn his ninth album, Indigo, Chris Brown goes to great lengths to make sure we know that he’s matured. He’s eager to share the lessons he’s learned about life and love on songs like the smooth “Back to Love” and “All on Me”: “All these wrongs that I’ve done, I’m just tryna make it right,” he bleats on the latter track. You can tell that the self-proclaimed King of R&B is enlightened because he talks about love, energy, and vibrations throughout the 32-track double album, but there’s no sense that he’s attempted to assemble these ideas into a coherent artistic or even personal statement.

Spirituality doesn’t preclude sexuality—“I just wanna realign your chakras,” Brown sings on “Emerald”—but the two are otherwise kept separate across Indigo’s distended two-hour runtime. It might make sense if each section of the album were devoted to a different aspect of Brown’s apparent multitudes, but there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the song sequencing here, shifting abruptly between tracks about self-improvement and sexual hubris.

A series of back-to-back songs in the first half of the album are nothing more than dick-measuring contests between Brown and guests like Tyga, Gunna, and Lil Wayne, with the singer going out of his way—just in case we doubted it—to make it clear just how much he likes “pussy.” From “Wobble Up” to “Just Like That,” he finds no shortage of ways to tell women how to sit on his dick. On “Sexy,” Brown and guest Trey Songz take R. Kelly-style smarm to puerile new depths: “Oh, I’m hard in my pants, give me a hand.”

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Indigo is lean compared to 2017’s interminable 45-track Heartbreak on a Full Moon, but the album’s lumbering pace and homogeneity overshadow even its few gems, like the sax-infused “Sorry Enough” and the smooth, disco-inflected “Side Nigga.” And what memorable hooks there are can be credited to sampled songs from the 1990s, including Shanice’s “I Love Your Smile” on “Undecided” and Aaliyah’s “Back and Forth” on “Throw It Back.” A handful of two-part suites like “Natural Disaster/Aura” and “Trust Issues/Act In” at least bother with the pretense of ambition. Otherwise, Indigo fails to justify both its duration and existence.

Score: 
 Label: RCA  Release Date: June 28, 2019  Buy: Amazon

Alexa Camp

Alexa is a PR specialist, writer, and fashionista.

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