“Zombies” deploys its P-Funk-style synthesizers to ooze along nicely as it sets up a slow-creeping horror-movie scenario that doubles as a warning about exploitation. Awaken, My Love is the third studio album by American recording artist Donald Glover, under his stage name Childish Gambino. But Childish Gambino generally makes good use of what it borrows. Sometimes Childish Gambino shares the songwriting credits directly with its influences, like the Funkadelic members behind the frantic funk of “Riot!” Other songs hold obvious echoes “Baby Boy,” a ballad that worries over fatherhood and custody, directly models its sparse arrangement on “ Just Like a Baby” by Sly and the Family Stone. But he’s well-suited to more cartoonish 1970s approaches: yowls and cackles, grainy screams, squeezed-out falsettos, zany swoops between speech and song. He knows he’s not the one to put across a full-throated love ballad he doesn’t try.

When lead singles Me and Your Mama and Redbone rolled. Glover’s longtime collaborator in Childish Gambino, the Swedish musician and producer Ludwig Goransson, realistically reconstructs the greasy guitar tones, sliding synthesizers, eager backup vocals, snappy drums and chattering clavinet of 1970s-vintage production. The post-Atlanta narrative dictated that Awaken, My Love, Glover’s third album, would also be his first brilliant one. But he inhabits it like an actor who’s done his homework to get fully immersed in a role. Commonly known as the only great Childish Gambino album, Awaken My Love is super important. Glover, born in 1983, never heard the music in its original time frame. Besides the person, the quality that conjoins Donald Glover, the actor and writer, and Childish Gambino. The album shares the perils of all revivalism: that it’s an emulation and pastiche rather than an invention, that it’s nostalgic rather than contemporary. Mosi Reeves Childish Gambinos third album is Awaken, My Love Ibra Ake You could argue that Childish Gambino became a great hip-hop artist when he stopped rapping, but that would be unfair. Donald Glover’s ‘Awaken, My Love’ is a period piece with infrequent original soul.

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