For All the Dogs Scary Hours Edition Review

The standard edition is twenty three tracks of a bored rich man and this catalog grades it a tier below what follows. This is the version that matters, and the difference is simple: across the six new songs he raps. Red Button is a threat delivered flat and slow, no hook anywhere near it. Stories About My Brother is the most direct writing he has done in years, a story told straight with nothing to hide behind.

Wick Man and The Shoe Fits are technical exercises and he plainly enjoys doing them. Evil Ways pairs him with J. Cole a few months before that alliance publicly falls apart, and taken on its own terms it is two rappers competing rather than two rappers agreeing. You Broke My Heart closes in the wounded register he has always been best in. He wrote and recorded the batch in under a week, and it shows in the beats, which are frames rather than events, deliberately plain so the voice sits forward.

That is why production is the low axis on a card that is otherwise strong. The reception split between hearing the surprise release as a man who should have taken a break instead and hearing it as the rescue of a failed album, and the second reading has aged better. Twenty nine tracks running close to two hours is an absurd object to ask anyone to sit with. But those last six tracks are as good as he gets, and a grade answers for the peak as much as the sprawl.