Who is the real Childish Gambino? The punchline rapper of 2013’s Because the Internet, exploring his identity crises alongside the majestic movie magic of Ludwig Göransson? The psychedelic funkateer of 2016’s “Awaken My Love” who sang psychedelic ragers about love, unity and rebellion? The experimental R&B star of 2020’s 3.20.2020, who tinkered with dance and country and all kinds of Prince-isms? The answer, of course, is all of the above, so don’t be surprised that his fifth and supposedly final album, Bando Stone & the New World, has the actor-writer-director-comedian-singer-rapper-songwriter-producer bouncing between genre like he bounces between film roles.
The multi-hyphenate auteur born Donald Glover has been threatening to retire the “Childish Gambino” moniker for about seven years and Bando Stone feels like he wants to revisit everything he loves and check a few things off of his bucket list for good measure. There’s love songs and proud dad songs, corrosive industrial rap and gleaming pop-punk, punchlines and disses, a seven-minute Afrobeat jam and a Yeat collaboration. The entire affair is a 60-minute soundtrack to a post-apocalyptic film of the same name, with a trailer that looks like a combo of The Road, Annihilation and Jurassic Park. The way ideas, guests, sounds and genres interact on here is reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar’s curation work on Black Panther: The Album. The difference is that Gambino doesn’t pick his favorite artists, he just does it himself.
When it works, he can still cook up something masterful. The minimal noise-rap of opener “H3@RT$ W3RE M3@NT T0 F7¥” is a headbanger that sizzles like Kanye West’s Yeezus.“Got to Be” starts in a drunken stupor and then dives into the moshpit and the Matrix, a banger constructed from proven bangers by the Prodigy and Luke. He enlists vibe-merchants Khangrubin for a chill piece of Afro-Brazilian haze (“Happy Survival”) and gets Kamasi Washington to play the Fela role for the album highlight “No Excuses,” a sprawling combination of vocodered neo-soul, exotica textures, afrobeat rhythms and the BaBenzélé pygmy whistle sounds made famous by Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters. “Can You Feel Me,” a duet with his oldest son, Legend, is brilliantly built on Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s gorgeous, endlessly listenable rendition of “The ABC Song” from a late-Eighties episode of Sesame Street.
However, some of Gambino’s ideas would have been better served if he just hired Weezer or Pusha T to deliver them. His pop-rock songs (“Lithonia,” “Real Love,” “Running Around”) are overproduced and emo-fried into oblivion — the latter sounds like Fall Out Boy covering Bon Jovi’s “Runaway.” He gets into battle rap mode on “Survive” and “Yoshinoya.” Fans seem convinced the shots are aimed at Drake, but after the nuclear dismantling of Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” the idea of parsing toothless sub-Tweets (“Fuck with my kids, you fuck with your life/You fuckin’ these hoes, I’m fuckin’ my wife”) feels especially unappealing.
Despite all the shape-shifting, you get the feeling that the real Childish Gambino just wants to be Donald Glover, whether that means singing “I ain’t show up to the Grammy’s/I’d rather be with my family” (“Can You Feel Me”) or just celebrating their vacations in Nantucket (“Steps Beach”). Even if the exploratory Bando Stone doesn’t get Glover another Grammy and Number One for the road, you can tell he’s walking away happy, fulfilled and no longer childish.
