Sometimes in life we all overswag. Two months ago, Justin Bieber shocked the world with his excellent Swag, his first album in four years. It was the artistic comeback he needed — sweet validation after all his celebrity meltdowns, troubling headlines, paparazzi battles, and social-media disasters. So there’s something perfect about Swag II — after catching everyone off-guard before, he’s immediately back with the lame album everyone expected last time. He could have called it Swag and It’s Completely Different and Not Very Good but Also Still Swag.
The first one was a deeply weird personal statement from an artist going through six kinds of it. But Swag II is everything the original wasn’t: slick, anonymous, half-assed, playing depressingly safe. Out of 23 songs, there’s maybe five or six keepers, buried in way too many duds that drag on forever at three minutes. Who knows — maybe Swag III will be the remix album where God joins him for a surprise Lorde-style duet on “Story of God.” (“No no, Justin — YOUR voice is the foundation of everything!”)
Bieber just announced Swag II yesterday, promising it would drop at midnight. Except it ended up getting delayed for four hours — so it’s intriguing to ponder which last-minute details Bieber was still working out at deadline time. Maybe he spent the extra hours trying to think up rhymes for “You look so good”? If so, what he came up with was “If you gave me the rights, you know I would.” (So probably not.)
Swag II the kind of sequel that just reminds you how great the first one was. On the surface, it sounds like the same formula, with a loose groove between R&B and indie rock. He brings back the same collaborators — Carter Lang, Dijon, Mk.gee — and even two of the same duet partners, Lil B and Eddie Benjamin. The guests include Nigerian Afrobeats star Tems, London indie songwriter Bakar, 2000s Louisiana rapper Hurricane Chris. But it’s a whole lotta less of the same. There aren’t even any therapy sessions with Druski — you keep hoping he’ll show up to offer Justin one of his Black and Milds.
Swag II is deep in his Nineties R&B bag, but with a fatal lack of melodies, giving his voice nothing to do. The producers don’t put out like last time, so the whole thing sounds totally generic. When it’s bad, Swag II sinks into self-parody, as in “Need It,” “Speed Demon,” or “I Think You’re Special,” where Tems is completely wasted. As on the first album, Lil B appears in an uplifting moment, “Safe Space.” Yet this time he doesn’t give the Based God any room to say anything, beyond a few hype-man hollers. The occasional squeak of guitar strings is an old cliché of folkie authenticity, but in songs like “Mother In You,” it sounds like the acoustic guitar is just there to cram in as many intentional squeaks as possible, which feels phony.
But there are a few worthy tunes that live up to the original’s adventurous spirit. “Love Song” is clearly the peak, with a distorted piano loop — the one moment here where Mk.gee steps out. Bieber turns on the charm, crooning, “I wanna write you a love song, baby/I wanna write a good one you can’t stop singing to me.” He cruises around with the top down, as his lover’s hair whips in the wind, serenading her with poetic images like “An aesthetic happening on the radio station/Your eyebrows down in contemplation.”
“Witchya” flows on another breezy groove, with hippie-country guitar twang. In “Moving Fast,” Bieber testifies about his struggles over blues guitar (“I was speeding towards the fall, I was 25”), until a disco drum loop kicks in. “Everything Hallelujah” is the flip side — stripped-down Bieber gospel-soul, with shoutouts to his wife Hailey, his son Jack, his parents, and his dogs. (“Oscar, Piggy, hallelujah!”)
“Ear Candy” is a clever mix of Nineties Britpop shimmer and Eighties beatbox rap. But it’s also got the album’s most humiliatingly awful moment when Bieber sings, “You could spread your wings and open up,” which is straight from the Rod Stewart school of ornithology metaphors.
The nadir might be “Petting Zoo,” an utterly blah guitar loop where Bieber vents about marital conflict without any hint of the real-life emotional turmoil he’s already bared in public. It sounds like one of his dodgiest social-media rants. “I told you that you fighting with a man!” Bieb informs the lucky lady. “I told you I don’t play that shit, no cap/Bitch, I told you I ain’t doing tit-for-tat.” (At least it would be kinda funny if the rhyming line was “Mother’s Day sucks ass.”)
But then there’s “Story of God,” easily the most bizarre moment in a discography full of bizarre. Bieber goes off the deep end with an eight-minute spoken-word sermon about the Bible story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He’s always been fond of ending his albums with overbaked religious fluff, but wow. Over church organ, Bieber explains how awesome it was living in Eden. “There was no fear here — fear hadn’t even been INVENTED yet!” But wait, there’s more: “It’s a feast, right? Everywhere you look, taste the explosion in your mouth!”
Spoiler: There’s a snake, so things don’t end well for Adam and Eve. “We lost paradise,” Bieber laments at the end. “We lost an unbroken connection. We broke the world.” Jeepers creepers, so to speak. If you hear “Story of God” this weekend, it means you’ve stayed at the party too long and your host is going nuclear to drive the damn guests out the door. But what the hell — you have to admire the chutzpah of this thing. On an album where he’s playing it dismally safe, it’s far better to hear him drop a totally unhinged monstrosity on this scale. It would have been even cooler if he’d brought back Druski to play the role of God. But you can’t accuse him of half-assing it, and there’s real emotion in his voice, more than you can say for “Forgiveness” or “Pray.” Remixers, get busy on this one.
Swag II doesn’t kill the buzz of the original, which still sounds great. Rather, the failures here just highlight everything that makes Swag sound so fresh and off-the-wall. Will Bieber stretch it out into a trilogy with Swag III: I’m Still Standing on Business, Yeah Yeah Yeah? Don’t put it past him. But either way, Swag II already sounds like a minor footnote.
