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Childish Gambino’s Brilliant ‘Atavista’ Finally Gets Its Day in the Sun: Album Review


Childish Gambino-aka-Donald Glover's brilliant '3.15.20' album, quietly released early in the pandemic, has been overhauled, retitled and re-released.

But in any form, the album is a masterpiece, not only Glover’s best work but one of the great R&B-leaning sets of the past decade and a kaleidoscopic showcase for his seemingly endless talents: He sings, raps, multitracks dense layers of his and others’ voices, puts on different characters for different songs; he mixes live instruments with vintage analog and digital electronic keyboards. His collaborators included Ariana Grande, 21 Savage, Khadja Bonet (who, in the absence of actual credits, many people initially thought was SZA) and coproducers DJ Dahi (Kendrick Lamar, Drake) and Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Goransson. However, his comments last month suggested he’d had a change of heart, and implied that he released the album at that time, even though it was unfinished, because he simply wanted it to exist for fans in case the world ended (a dramatic but not-unreasonable sentiment in March of 2020).

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