THE PRESS RELEASE: “Grammy, Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning recording artist, actor and producer Donald Glover presents 3.15.20. The album is available in two forms on all digital streaming platforms – a continuous play version under Donald Glover Presents, and a standard track-by-track version under Childish Gambino. To promote a communal vibe, fans across the globe can experience the album simultaneously at DonaldGloverPresents.com for a limited time. 3.15.20 contains 12 tracks with appearances by Ariana Grande, 21 Savage and Khadja Bonet.”
Track List (numerical titles correspond to starting points in video above):
1 | 0.00
2 | Algorhythm – 02:59
3 | Time – 06:31
4 | 12.38 aka Vibrate
5 | 19.10 aka Beautiful
6 | 24.19 aka Sweet Thing/Thank You
7 | 32.22 aka Warlords
8 | 35.31 aka Little Foot, Big Foot, Get Out The Way
9 | 39.28 aka Why Go To The Party?
10 | 42.26 aka Feels Like Summer
11 | 47.48 aka The Violence
12 | 53.49 aka Under The Sun
MY TWO CENTS: We may be trapped in the darkest timeline right now. Not to mention stuck inside our individual homes and headspaces. But hey, that don’t mean we can’t dance. And take a much-needed mind-clearing, soul-cleansing interior trip in place of an actual outing IRL. And who better to deliver it like pizza to a flaming bedroom than Troy Barnes himself — aka Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino (aka Earnest Marks if you wanna take it all the way to Atlanta) — via his fourth album 3.15.20. Quietly and briefly released as one massive loop (and with no cover art) on the title date, this 57-minute masterpiece finds Glover/Gambino ambitiously pushing the sonic and stylistic envelope even farther than he has previously (which is saying something). If you’re looking for touchstones, there are plenty — these cuts take plenty of cues from latter-day George Clinton P-Funk and early/more experimental Prince, with dashes of Death Grips, clipping., Anderson .Paak and assorted others thrown into the mix. Not surprisingly, that makes for a supremely and superbly diverse affair. Playing out more like a well-sequenced mixtape than a traditional song-based album, these freewheeling, meandering and compellingly replayable tracks unfailingly hit a host of satisfying sweet spots — groovy vs. trippy, organic vs. electronic, introverted vs. extroverted, noisy vs. melodic, funky vs. soulful, and plenty more besides. The sweetest spot of all: Along the way, they can, should and most likely will help free your mind. With any luck, your ass will follow.
