Today I'll be going back and looking at Logic's second studio album, The Incredible True Story, hope you enjoy!
Going back and listening to this just reminds me of how hard Logic fell off. On The Incredible True Story, he mixes comedic elements with great production and a consistent theme. Compared to his later works, it comes off as much more sincere and it sounds like he’s having more fun. This is partly due to the skits that he includes which give nice context to the album while adding points for humor. The album doubles as a story, and we get the plot through the perspective of characters Thomas and Kai. They’re looking for a new planet “Paradise” after Earth has been destroyed by humans (keep in mind that this takes place 100 years in the future). Throughout the album, the skits make the project more than just a vaguely connected collection of songs. The concepts are just different enough so that they fit together but don’t feel the same. From “The Cube - Scene” where Kai tells Tom about how girls “love the rubix cube” to the much more serious “Babel -Scene,” where a lucid Thomas realizes the possibility that humans could destroy “Paradise” just like they did Earth. Overall, Logic did great with the skits. Varying content and hilarious dialogue truly bring life to this album.
On the real songs themselves, Logic’s flows are mixed between trying to go as fast as he can and being relaxed on the beat. As a general rule of thumb, for my liking, the faster Logic tries to go, the worse it usually sounds. When he tries to say as many words as possible, those words lose meaning. This album is one where you can’t afford to do that, as there is a clear concept trying to be explained. Lyrically, there were much less corny moments than we usually expect from Logic. On projects like Bobby Tarantino 2, half the lines are about how no one wants him to succeed and how he’s better than the haters. Here, we get more true content that relates to the the album. With that being said, we did catch one glimpse of what was to come. “I Am The Greatest” is exactly what you think it’s about and already wears out the flexing with just one song. His fall off can largely be contributed to the boredom one gets when hearing that for a whole album. For the most part though, that was the only track that suffered from this critique and it doesn’t take much away as it’s just that, one song.
On my first listen after this was requested, I was pleasantly surprised at how good the beats were. “Intermission” mixes vocals nicely with piano melodies to create a top 3 track on the album. On “Young Jesus,” he fuses a sample of James Blake‘s “Take A Fall For Me” with boom-bap drums. This combination along with a great feature from Big Lembo truly does “take us back to the 90’s” (like he claims in its introduction).
However, besides “Young Jesus” and a couple of other tracks like “Fade Away” and “City of Stars,” Logic’s flows are subpar and start to feel identical. He fails to change it up enough and it starts to feel very repetitive. The rapasfastasyoucan style got overused and is my main issue with this album. With your delivery, you can portray emotions and many other things, but we see the same thing over and over again, and it makes many of the tracks very one-dimensional.
Overall, we should have celebrated this album at the time, as it’s basically the last good Logic we would get. Creative production and hilarious interludes are the great elements of this album that give it its own personality. Creativity: 3/3 Content: 2/3 Production: 2/3 Total Delivery: 1/3 Album Flow: 3/3 Rating: 7.4/10 || Best Songs: Contact, Intermission, Fade Away, Young Jesus, The Incredible True Story
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