Psquare’s ‘The Invasion’ [Album Review]

You can’t teach an old dog a new trick. This saying best sums up the fifth album by Africa’s biggest and most famous group Psquare. After giving their massively hyped ‘The Invasion’ a good spin or two you get to know that beneath the layer of their Euro-pop beats, it’s the same old Peter and Paul with their same old gimmicks of jacking and cheesy lyrics.
If you got a feeling that you’ve heard the album opener ‘Beautiful Onyinye’ before, you are correct as it is a lazy rehash of their previous hit ‘No One like You’. The album picks up on ‘Chop My Money’ featuring their latest signing May D. Not wanting to drop the party tempo ‘Asamkpoto’ comes next. The party jam reveals another Psquare faux pas as the instrumental is a brazen rip-off of one of Samklef’s popular beats.
From here on, the album is divided into contemporary highlife songs and Euro-pop tracks. While the sloppy singles ‘Forever’ and ‘Bunieya Enu’ threaten to bore you, ‘Do As I Do’ featuring Tiwa Savage & May D and ‘She’s Hot’ featuring Naeto C help to raise the temperature of the contemporary highlife groove.
Mixed results also trail their experimentation with the Euro-Pop genre which is the trend right now. No doubt, they get the beats hands down as they are solely capable of making you move in the club but it’s quite obvious that the twins are not masters of these genres as their vocals uncomfortably float on the instrumental without making an impression on you. However on songs such as ‘Jeje’ featuring Waje and ‘Player’  they seem to get it right.
It’s not all dance through and through. The LP’s deepest cut is a slow reggae track titled ‘Me and My Brother’ which chronicles their rise to fame while ‘Ole Buruku’ represents the music Psquare has been known for.
‘The Invasion’ feels all over the place, it doesn’t have a binding core to it which makes it loose. Maybe P-Square wanted to prove that they can be part of the crowd sadly however they are lost in it. What this album reveals is that is high time P-Square upgrade their approach to music or face irrelevancy within the next decade.