Mac Ayres is a rising Alternative R&B artist who debuted with his EP Drive Slow in August 2017. Something To Feel is Ayres’s first full-length debut album. While Drive Slow was a phenomenal masterpiece, Something To Feel disappointed me as a fan that has been waiting to hear more from him since his first work.

Something To Feel is a fairly slow album with a very consistent style, and the songs seem to drag because of how repetitive the tempo, beats and melody are. There are little to no upbeat songs, almost putting me to sleep every time I listened to the album. For example, “Waiting” and “Under” are both six minutes each, but they are technically the same song, with “Waiting” only a little bit faster. Both have the same overused beat that Ayres uses in a lot of his songs. I had to refrain myself from pressing skip every time they came on — although I wanted to skip almost every single song in the album.

“Get To You Again” was a song that I enjoyed a little bit more compared to the rest of the album. I wanted to find a reason why I liked it, but I came up with nothing other than the fact that it reminded me of “Easy”, a song from the Drive Slow EP which is my favorite song of all time.  It has the same generic Mac Ayres style that starts off as slow, with the beat dropping after a few seconds. The same feel goes for “I’ve Always Been”, the only other good song on the album and also one of the shortest songs, lasting only over a minute which is good because it didn’t drag as much as the other songs did.

“This Bag” is the most different song, only because Ayres did not use digital synthesizers and focused on musical instruments, so he did not have his usual beat drops. In some parts, the instruments were very faint, and it was almost like they faded into the background which made the song almost acapella-like. It does have the usual tempo and melody, but he takes a different approach which is a refreshing change for the album.

“Next to You” reminds me of a Justin Timberlake song, only because of the falsetto Ayres uses which is somewhat similar to Timberlake’s. Of course, it still has that generic vibe Ayres has in a lot of his songs. This song necessarily doesn’t stand out for me, but the falsetto was a nice change.

I am not able to talk about any of the other songs in the album without saying what I’ve been saying throughout this entire review, which is the fact that they sound exactly the same. The fact that the songs have a similar vibe and nature doesn’t make anything stand out. Other times I didn’t even know if the song changed or not until I checked the title; that’s how similar they are to each other. Something To Feel’s songs are nice to listen to once, but you can’t help but skip them after the second or third time. To me, Something To Feel was a disappointment and could never come close to Drive Slow’s level.