It’s somewhat unbelievable that T-Pain would ever feel the need to reintroduce himself, but here we are. Six years removed from his last proper album, he opens Oblivion in grand fashion, kicking open the casket at his own funeral. He offers his gratitude to loyal fans and fuck-yous to those who wrote him off—all before he settles into his lead verse with a succinct reminder of his resume: “I hit the Billboards with a baseball bat.”
The charismatic “rappa ternt sanga” dropped his debut single “I’m Sprung” in 2005, setting off the Midas touch era of T-Pain. His signature Auto-Tuned voice landed in the the Hot 100 over 30 times in a five-year period, and everyone from Kanye West to Black Eyed Peas adopted their own renditions. It feels like a musical lifetime has passed since then, but nostalgia and excitement still follow him wherever he goes. The wave crested with his 2014 Tiny Desk concert when a portion of the world learned T-Pain can actually sing without digital assistance. The moment spawned a brief acoustic tour this year and, probably, a glimmer of hope that Oblivion would follow suit. Instead, it finds him channeling the ghosts of past. Nearly every song sounds like it could've been a smash several years ago which is, both, admirable and disappointing.
On the one hand, his ability to churn out earworms remains untarnished. The selection is everything T-Pain does best: intoxicating computerized crooning mixed with gratuitous sex and flash. On the other, there’s the admittedly unreasonable expectation that one of Rap&B’s most influential artists would hint at the genre’s next horizon or, at the very least, his own. While there may be a few seeds here, Oblivion settles mostly in his established wheelhouse. Songs like “Straight” and “2 Fine” are low-stakes affairs that find T-Pain playing around with his assorted vocals, flows, and ad-libs—it’s genuinely fun. But his ingenuity shines brightest on the Mr. Talkbox-assisted standout “May I.” Running like two passionate robots serenading a jazz lounge, it is the peak use of a computer to make the voice an instrument unto itself—nearly eight minutes of finesse that only T-Pain could pull off.
Oblivion’s most unexpected feature is its mix of sub-genres that T-Pain chameleons himself into perfectly. From trap rap (“Goal Line”) to Latin-flavored pop (“No Rush”) to the percussive lands of go-go (“Cee Cee From DC”), it’s almost like a best-of but with all new music. In his grasp, the respective genres end up sounding poppier rather than like true interpretations, but it's nice to hear an artist push his own creative boundaries—even if the source material is a bit watered down. There’s a masterpiece somewhere in the colors of all these disparate sounds if only it were trimmed just a bit more.
As such, Oblivion feels like a “business decision” album: it’s a casual affair that frees him from his label obligation to RCA. It isn’t exactly phoned in, but T-Pain has more in his tank than what he shows here, even though the tracks that reflect his past eras display his versatility and allow for optimistic glimpses of a career resurgence. The free-spirited energy that earned him ubiquity a decade ago remains intact despite his fall from glory. This album reflects the best of what we know of him, but the unknown remains the most intriguing. Projected ambitions aside, this release typifies just how ahead of his time he was and how much those melodic blurred lines influenced the generations that followed—sing-raps can‘t be fully attributed to him, but he certainly played a substantial part. The genre fluidity he shows here helped lay the foundation for artists to come. And even in a landscape that outgrew him or outran him or both, Oblivion T-Pain sounds like a teacher who still feels welcome in his own classroom, and he’s owed at least that.
