Jungle Rules Review
An Album by French Montana
I’ve never really liked French Montana’s solo music. Then again, he’s only come out with one album before this one, but that album was horrendous. On Jungle Rules, French Montana is improving his weaknesses, but he doesn’t get rid of them. He is still inconsistent and weak with some of his lyrics.
French Montana seems to know what he’s doing on about half the songs on this album. He has some great instrumentals that are very hard hitting and fruity. He also has some great features and hooks, and some of the songwriting on here is pretty good, too.
The first song on this album that you notice isn’t as great as some of the others is the song A Lie featuring The Weeknd and Max B. This song has a pretty weak hook and The Weeknd is on it more than he should be. It also sounds like a song that would come out of a DJ Khaled album, which is not a good thing.
Hotel Bathroom is the second song on this tracklist that comes out as very mediocre. The lyrics are very, very dumb. Plus, the hook doesn’t even sound like a hook when you listen to it. Throughout this song he just repeats and repeats himself but uses different ways to say what he’s saying, sometimes an artist can get away with this but on this song it’s so blatantly obvious that he probably just couldn’t think of what else to say.
The song Bag featuring Ziico Niico isn’t completely horrible, but it’s not good either. The hook by Ziico Niico is just very lazily done, and the song just doesn’t do anything for me at all.
The album starts to spew out some really horrible songs after all of the songs with great features came in. The first one is the song She Workin featuring Marc E. Bassy. This song is just very saturated with a pop-style that wouldn’t work with a French Montana song. Hearing French Montana collaborate with a singer just doesn’t sound right. The next song that just is not good is the song Formula featuring Alkaline. This song really tries to have a Jamaican-pop style to it, but it just ended up giving me a headache. It sounds very annoying and wouldn’t even sound good in a club.
Too Much is possibly the worst song on this album, besides Formula at least. I hate this song so much because it sounds like French Montana made this song in 2010, which was a time of horrible rap songs made for the clubs of Miami. It sounds like the beat was made for the rapper Pitbull and the lyrics are just so stupid and cliche that I’m still wondering why French Montana would put this song on the album. The last song on the album, White Dress, has lyrics that sound similar to the song Hotel Bathroom. When I heard this song, the beat wasn’t bad, but I felt like I’ve already heard it. This is when I realized that French Montana really could’ve ran out of material for this album.
The major problem I had with this album was really mainly the lyrics and the hooks. The instrumentals on this album could’ve saved some of these songs if they were a little more decent, but sadly some of these songs with great instrumentals just came out badly.
The rest of the songs on this album, or at least the ones I haven’t mentioned, are really good. The songs Unforgettable, Jump, Bring Dem Things, Migo Montana, No Pressure, Stop It, and Black Out are really the best songs on the album, because of the features. That’s the problem with French Montana, he rarely can make a solo track that’s good. He needs to have features to make good songs. Luckily, with features, he can still make good music. But it just doesn’t make him a good artist.
There are some good solo tracks by French Montana on this album, though. These songs are Trippin, Push Up, and Famous. Trippin is catchy and relatable, on Push Up he has a great flow and it has a banging instrumental, and on the song Famous he has great songwriting and a great hook.
This album isn’t one of the worst rap albums I’ve heard this year. But, it isn’t in my list of good rap albums either. It’d probably somewhere on the bottom of my good rap albums list. French Montana made a decent album, and it’s an improvement from his 2013 album, Excuse My French.
Album Grade: 6/10