Release Date: 2 December 2020
Song Count: 7
Rating: 5.0/10
Description:
(Apologies for the date of this entry showing as a day later, I've only come around to writing this review past the midnight mark of the day.)
Though the albumthon was initially designed to be a one-month long personal challenge, I have decided quite a while ago to extend this journey further, and today is the day where this decision officially sets off. This album is among the shortest reviewed here so far at only around 19 minutes, and comes from the young Nigerian-American artist Dreamer Isioma who is a more recent face in the world of music, having started in 2018 and gaining recognition two years later when a song of theirs, "Sensitive", achieved virality. He has since been actively making music under the record label AWAL to a modest yet dedicated audience.
The Leo Sun Sets is amongst Isioma's earlier released works, and given certain attributes within the tracks, it is, as brutal as it is to say, relatively easy to tell. The rhythmic flow of both the instrumentals and especially the vocals with their several different styles are ambitious and certainly pay off well at certain moments, but fall rather unorganic and flat at others. Where these elements of the songs trip over, however, what generally pulls things back together is the production quality being not only consistent, but also allowing for experimentation within the tracks in terms of their wildly different sounds and ambiences with its flexibility.
Isioma's vocals also fit these tracks to varying levels of success, sounding youthful, uplifting and full of soul in some songs - such as in "I Feel Fantastic" - whilst coming off as almost outright off-putting and immature at other times within the album. The latter effect suffers the misfortune of being further amplified by the overabundance of questionable lyricism that, at times, read like it was written by an individual far younger than the artist's age at the year of release, with its needlessly crude language, disjointedness and lack of sense for the sake of rhyming and preserving a flow. While this isn't an all-prevalent issue, it does sour the experience with how on-the-nose it can present itself to be.
While there are enjoyable parts of this work overall, it overall struck me as a mixed bag of some shining golden nuggets of music, along with some deep ruts on the road. There may be quite a few things to work on in this sample of songs for the future, but I am of the firm belief that Dreamer Isioma holds a lot of potential as an artist, and it will be quite intriguing to see what else they have achieved and will soon achieve in their other musical endeavours.