8/10
Favorite Track: Hand Me Downs Least Favorite Track: I Can See
“I already had plans about the future involving him, I had a pile of instruments aside to give him. I was more excited about him than I have been in quite some time”. As the executive producer of Circles Jon Brion, stared Zane Lowe dead in the eyes he looked as if he was resisting tears. Circles is the sixth studio album by American rapper and singer-songwriter: Mac Miller. It posthumously serves as a companion piece to his last consciously released album; Swimming, in other words the two combine to form “Swimming in circles”. Upon first listen Circles didn’t sound like a Mac Miller project to me and therefore I had a laundry list of problems with it. My discontent and sad energy focussed on the loss of Mac, translated into my initial thoughts of the album. I wanted Circles to bring Mac back, despite knowing it couldn’t. However, with each listen I started to realize that Circles takes Mac Miller and lies him down in a peaceful meadow of flowers beside a red Fender six-string rather than a substance infested home studio. The project is a beautiful and emotional goodbye to one of the most genuine and artistic souls of this generation. I think given the chance Mac could have evolved this new singer-songwriter angle into something even more special if he had the time to fuse it with his rap style from previous projects like Faces and GO:OD AM, but it is apparent that the universe didn’t have that in his plan and maybe there's something beautiful to be said about this fall from grace and the emotionally cathartic goodbye it provided us with. There is no one else in the industry who could have arranged the pieces of this project together to make it sound as finished as it does besides Jon Brion. I was wrong, Circles sounds like a Mac Miller album, and that's the best part about it. Not a Mac Miller project in style, because Circles is the definition of stylistic evolution, but a Mac Miller album in soul ,spirit, and love. Circles is an anxiety-provoking story of a fall from grace, told from the perspective of the one falling. The first lines of the album give me chills every time they grace my ears; “Well, this is what it feels like right before you fall.”
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