It’s not hard to see why Travi$ Scott has very quickly become a big deal in hip-hop. Much like his sonic father, Kid Cudi, his songs hover like glowing magnets – you don’t quite know how they work but you can’t look away. It’s why, ten years after Cudi’s debut mixtape, the Lonely Stoner still has a fervent following.

But just like Cudi, Scott isn’t as good as everyone wants him to be. Astroworld is nothing if not fascinating. Its title is actually remarkably accurate; this project sounds like it could soundtrack a stroll through a half-abandoned carnival at midnight on LSD. Scott gives it everything he’s got, stacking a truly gobsmacking amount of talent together across 17 tracks. When it’s great, it’s really fucking impressive. But a lot of the time it just feels like a tease.

Astroworld’s spaced-out carnival aesthetic only comes through because it is an exceptionally well-produced album. Scott has a producer’s background, and while he doesn’t get production credits on most of the album’s tracks his booming, cavernous sound is an imprint from beginning to end. He also loves sending beats down weird, trippy hallways before reeling them in again or leaving them hanging entirely. It’s a skill he’s mastered. ‘Wake Up’ is a fairly mundane track with a forgettable hook provided by The Weeknd until the final minute where the beat pulls back and a watery guitar plays it out with light-tapping snares. ‘Stargazing’, the album intro and one of the only real ‘complete’ songs, starts off epically with a woodwind instrument in the background, then the beat plunges underwater half-way through before submerging for Scott’s final verse.

It only works because Scott is the most ambitious producer/curator in hip-hop at the moment. Guitars and synths come together on this album in weirdly perfect ways, like a jigsaw puzzle in Post Malone’s dreams. ‘Yosemite’ bizarrely sounds like Yosemite! It features a lone flute and a heavy plucked guitar, yet the strange, jittery chorus by Gunna skirts perfectly over the track. You’ll hear vampiric organs often over the album, like on the great ‘Skeletons’, and they slide in effortlessly with the haunted-house theme.

But what is actually fucking going on half the time? It’s all well and good to craft an album with weird hypnotic shapeshifting beats, but what are these tracks actually about? And what is Astroworld about? What is Scott trying to achieve?

The problem is that, just like the Almighty Cudder, Travi$ Scott is a pretty terrible rapper. There are 17 tracks here, a hell of  a lot of rapping from him, and barely a single bar stands out in any way. He spends most of the time huddled around the same clichéd topics over and over again (“all that fall-in-love shit, gotta Kevin Hart/all that speed and fly shit, we might teleport/all that cop harass shit, I might clip a sarge”). He talks about sex but makes it sound boring and robotic, he mentions police abuse occasionally but it never feels like his heart is in it, and he regurgitates the same ho-hum threats repeatedly. If you’ve heard one Scott verse, you’ve heard them all.

It’s a bit of a shame because, somewhat like Drake with his issues on Scorpion, Scott leads a particularly interesting life… and he should have some interesting things to say. On ‘Astrothunder’ he starts off promisingly (‘seems like the life I feen’s a little different… seems like the life I need’s a little distant”), suggesting he might explore some of that emptiness, before devolving into the same old tropes. When he actually reveals something about himself – specifically finding out he has a child with Kylie Jenner – on album closer ‘Coffee Bean’, he’s just clumsy (“your family told you I’m a bad move, plus I’m already a black dude/leavin’ the bathroom/my hands is half-rinsed/if only a nigga just had sense”).

But even Scott seems to recognise that lyricism isn’t his strong suit so he has a few tricks up his sleeve. He uses his voice more as an instrument than to communicate anything important. It’s doused in layers and layers of Autotune, and he artificially raises it sharply at times to clash with the beat. He uses ad-libs to the same effect. If you hated that soapy Autotune tone before, you’ll hate it here. But otherwise, it compliments the production nicely in the same way Young Thug is often able to.

His other trick is to assemble one of the most amazing casts of talent on a single project in years. It’s almost overwhelming. Sometimes this works brilliantly – ‘Stop Trying To Be God’ is an epic, rousing anthem featuring harmonising hums from Kid Cudi, harmonica from Stevie Wonder that oddly works, and a completely unnecessary outro from James Blake. Scott sings the hook with such confidence that it becomes buried in your head for days. ‘Skeletons’, produced by Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, is another highlight, featuring whirling, slushy organs with The Weeknd and Pharrell singing the chorus together. ‘Astrothunder’ is a nicely understated affair, beautifully produced and dominated by a classic bassline from Thundercat (it’s also, weirdly enough, co-produced by John Mayer). Scott doesn’t say much on any of these tracks, but they represent his greatest strengths as a curator.

Unfortunately, there’s so many guests hammed onto Astroworld that plenty of them don’t come together. It’s impressive that Scott managed to get Frank Ocean to contribute at all, but they don’t combine well on ‘Carousel’. Drake starts off strong on ‘Sicko Mode’ but gets cut off early on and never recovers his momentum. A number of singers pop up throughout the album – The Weeknd, Swae Lee, Juice WRLD – and they do a decent job. But there’s undoubtedly a feeling that some of these tracks have just had guests forced onto them, either just to be overwhelming for the sake of it or to hide Travi$’s lack of lead-singer ability.

Astroworld, then, isn’t the ‘big moment’ everyone is waiting Travi$ Scott to have. But it is gutsy and enthralling. It has moments of genuine brilliance, and it comes from a fascinating mind. But people have been saying the same thing about Kid Cudi for ten years. They’ve waited and waited for Cudi to realise it all in one colossal, destiny-finding album. It’s never happened. Scott has enough talents that he could make that album. Just don’t let anyone convince you Astroworld is it.

7.2