Too much is sometimes enough
Rodeo sounds hungry to me. Not just hungry for attention, hungry for a world large enough to contain all its impulses. A track begins as one thing and seems to discover that it would rather be three things. I understand why that can sound undisciplined. I also think discipline is sometimes the wrong virtue to demand from a record whose appeal is the feeling of an imagination arriving faster than its own instructions.
The danger is visible. A long song can mistake duration for depth. A dramatic change can arrive because nobody knew how to finish the previous idea. Rodeo brushes against those problems, and I would rather acknowledge them than pretend that everything sprawling is secretly perfect. Its unevenness is part of what makes the successful passages feel earned.
The shape of wanting
90210 is where the ambition makes the most sense to me. The movement within the track gives desire different textures. One part seems to float, another becomes more grounded, and the shift makes the song feel like it has passed through an experience rather than merely accumulated sections. There is a difference between adding rooms to a house and changing what it feels like to live there.
Nightcrawler works through accumulation instead. The repetitions and voices make the night seem self sustaining, a place where momentum has replaced judgment. I do not need every song to confess something in a solitary voice. Sometimes the honest subject is the way a group feeling can swallow the individual who entered it.
What I like across these moments is the possibility of excess turning awkward. The record does not always seem protected from its own appetite. That risk gives its pleasures an urgency that immaculate branding struggles to reproduce. I hear someone reaching, and reaching is more affecting to me than being shown that a destination has already been purchased.
Before the blueprint hardens
I am wary of turning this into the usual story where an earlier album must be better because fewer people liked it. Popularity does not remove feeling. Better resources do not make an artist less sincere. What can disappear is the audible uncertainty about what the work is trying to become.
Rodeo holds my attention because its identity still feels under negotiation. It has the ambition of a finished monument and the instability of scaffolding. I want records to risk that instability more often. There is pleasure in a machine that runs beautifully, but there is another pleasure in hearing an idea discover its own shape while it is moving. I want ambition with something left to lose.