On the first foot, openers Can A Drummer Get Some and If You Want To certainly will leave you fooled, with heavy drum work and deft lyrical verses provided by some of the many guests who appear on them. Only after the music keeps pumping will you realise that this album seems to have one solid, over-bearing theme: hip hop.
While Barker may have some of the scene’s cream performing over his beats, it becomes nauseating when there are no steps over the line of drumming styles. Only a few tunes dare try and extend past the eventually static tone of this record: Saturday Night, featuring Barker’s own group The Transplants (and Slash, who for some reason seems to have decided to sound exactly like Santana, rather than himself), shows the only genre straddling fun, though not too broad, of the whole album. Raw *** and Just Chill might still be caught in the hip hop tangle, yet they show a little more variety, mostly thanks to Tech N9ne’s appearance in the earlier tune, and a great sampled hook in the latter.
Can A Drummer Get Some isn’t bad by any stretch, it just seems as though the main star of the show is never allowed to spread his wings past a tight boundary of style and genre. The production is clean and the drumming is tight and not buried in the mix. It’s just disappointing that a solo drummer’s album featuring guests doesn’t cover a larger spectrum – hard rock, punk, metal or even jazz – which would have been a nicer way to show the talent that Barker is capable of.
Not to ask for tears and blood, but even a little more personal introspection and lyrical input would have been welcome, especially with everything the guy has been through of late. Travis Barker hasn’t made a great solo album, but he has made a fly hip hop record. It just never takes off.
