Jesus Piece Review

The idea is simple and almost nobody in rap had sat in it properly. A man wears Christ in diamonds, has no intention of behaving, and is honest that the contradiction bothers him. Cool and Dre carry more of this board than anyone and they build it heavy, with organs and choirs and low end that sounds like a room rather than a speaker.

Ali Bomaye, built by Black Metaphor, is the best beat anyone hands him after 2005, a slow doom crawl he rides without ever hurrying. Jesus Piece and Pray and Hallelujah keep circling the same knot without resolving it, and Scared Now opens the album already inside the confessional. The common criticism on release is that the guests crowd him out and that the concept slips whenever a radio single is due, and both are true.

Celebration is a party record wedged into a confession, and he lets other people deliver the sharpest lines on his own album more than once. What earns the grade is that the whole thing holds a single mood across twelve tracks and that the mood is unusual for the genre: guilty, grand, unresolved. He never sounds this comfortable being a grown man on record again, and nothing else in his catalog sounds this good.