Yelawolf has spent years making Love Story, his second official album as a major label artist and first release since 2013’s Trunk Muzik Returns. The title of that last project, a mixtape, says plenty: Yelawolf was trying to recapture something he’d lost along the way. In the early years of his career, Yela seemed to be rattling around an industry that didn’t quite know how to deal with him. By 2009 he’d been signed and dropped by Columbia Records—an official debut got lost along the way—and then found his stride with a mixtape that might remain his best work to date. Trunk Musik 0-60, Interscope’s street album rehash of that mixtape, is the other contender. Yela had found a place—Interscope seemed to get him—and struck a chord.
When Radioactive rolled around in 2011 it felt like Yelawolf had broken a promise, or at least lost himself, in failed (and weird) crossover attempts. Unfortunately, and for different reasons, Love Story vies with that last album as the worst music of his career; as a result, it’s also getting harder to remember the gritty luster of his peak. Even worse, this new project seems to cement a damning new identity for Yela: once-compelling mixtape artist, shoddy album-maker.
With 18 tracks spanning more than 74 minutes, Love Story is far too long to accomplish so little and hits the same notes over and over again. It’s draining. Most glaring is Yelawolf’s devolution as a rapper: He’s developed a bad habit of leaning on cringey similes and seems to have forfeited the snappy, accelatory delivery that made 0-60 so fun to listen to and hard to rap along with. "Still on that grass like John Deeres," he raps on "Whiskey in a Bottle"; on "Love Story", he offers "Got my weight up like I’m carrying fat people." Here he is denouncing wannabe rednecks on "Change": "Yellin' redneck, you about as red as the color blue is." Those types of lines not only sound worse the second (and third) time around, they run rampant. On "Disappear" he feigns a cathartic letter to an estranged father—"You told me what you did, carpentry, right?"—and then at the end of the song a supposed-to-be-big reveal falls hopelessly flat: "I love you daddy, or should I say Christ?"
Love Story has moments that seem to aim at Americana. Sometimes that means thigh-slapping, rootsy country ("Have a Great Flight") and sometimes it’s psychedelic southern rock. In either case, they cast Yela as a cheesy pastiche artist. "Johnny Cash" features the rapper narrating his arms-length relationship with a live audience and then for a hook he just says "Johnny Cash" like half-a-dozen times. At surface level at least, "Best Friend" is the album’s attention-grabber with the solitary feature in the form of an extended, rambling Eminem verse. The appearance is the first we’ve heard from Em in 2015 and it’s a characteristically jumbled bit of technical braggadocio. At one point he strings together a series of bars that internally carry "shiggy-shock" and "im-piggy-possible" and ends with, "word to the diggy doc/ Stiggy-stopping is not an option." It’s like Eminem is breaking down a complicated piece of Ikea furniture and purposefully veering away from the instructions in putting it back together. Once it all fits, it’s hard to see what the point was.
As both an executive producer and label-head, Love Story signals a failure for Eminem as well, and bears the same structural flaws that nag his own late-career output—namely, a lot of filler, poor sequencing, and just too much of the same damn thing. Em’s fingerprints are all over the music and his own production credits yield plodding, heavy-handed beats that don’t suit Yelawolf’s once-erratic flow. The WillPower produced "Till It’s Gone", a single released last year that found a place during a plot climax on the FX show "Sons of Anarchy", feels like the best the album has to offer. Yelawolf doesn’t strain his singing here and settles into a marching flow over the looped-up acoustic guitar and heel-stomping bottom end. The hook is still full of platitudes and a not-so-productive tautology, but as a whole it’s better than everything else here. "Fiddle Me This" caps off the album with a rote "Devil Went Down to Georgia" interpolation bleeding into a gratuitous scratching interlude, and Yelawolf raps, "Yeah, I've done come a long way." Like the rest of the album though, there doesn't seem to be much to show for the journey, and Yelawolf sounds like he's just going through the motions instead of actually covering ground.
