Underrated: B.o.B (475 words)

B.o.B, has become one of the country's biggest pop superstars. With songs in his past that included Bruno Mars and Eminem, his success was pretty much inevitable. The debut album, B.o.B Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray, went on to sell over 500,000 copies with its singles exceeding over 8 million in sales.

However, what really cemented him into the limelight was the quadruple-platinum smash, "Airplanes," featuring Paramore's Hayley Williams. The song was unavoidable, and even when its buzz died down, B.o.B's didn't. That fall, he dropped the critically acclaimed mixtape, No Genre, as well as another the following year, E.P.I.C.; the mixtapes showed a promising direction for B.o.B's follow-up to Adventures. The result, Strange Clouds, will easily rake in the awards like its predecessor, but hardly for the reasons that made B.o.B worth being excited about to begin with.

Album opener "Bombs Away" starts off brilliantly with a Morgan Freeman intro, but that's all the track has going for it as it fails to capitalize on its beginning with any sort of similar excitement. Even the record's first single and title song strays away from what B.o.B normally offers with its awkward dubstep elements, a boring chorus, and a forced Lil Wayne cameo.

Strange Clouds continues to take more risks with Nicki Minaj bringing her batshit insanity in the worst ways to the frantic upbeat "Out of My Mind," but Taylor Swift comes in with the knockout on the mid-tempo ballad "Both of Us" -- a track that will easily crush the success of "Airplanes" on the charts. Additionally, other flaws exist within the record vocally as they don't feel nearly as explosive as they have in the past. The one constant that B.o.B has managed to maintain on not only this album, but throughout his entire career, is the production. Dr. Luke, Cirkut, and Ryan Tedder are among the plethora of producers that lay down their touch on select numbers, and it's a nice distraction when the songs don't live up to its highest substance. The only problem is ... that occurs way too often

The flow of Strange Clouds tends to vary between songs that are helping make the album great ("So Good," "Arena," "So Hard to Breathe"), and then the ones that keep pushing it down the route of a sophomore slump ("Ray Bands," "Just a Sign," "Play for Keeps"). Right when there's about to be a trend of some consistency, it ends up falling short. The charm within 2010's Adventures took place in the fact that whatever B.o.B was doing on it -- whether it was a ballad, club banger, or just blending a bunch of genres in one -- it seemed to be done effortlessly. With Strange Clouds, the vision just seems blurry, and hopefully he can recapture the magic on a future record.