Magic Review

This arrives on Christmas Eve with no campaign, which tells you how it wants to be heard. Twenty nine minutes, nine songs, one producer, no attempt at a statement. The beats are icy and minimal, closer to late night than to daylight, and they suit a rapper who at this stage would rather be precise than loud. Ugly opens with a hard, unfashionable drum pattern and a verse that keeps landing. 40-16 Building is the best thing here, a Queensbridge memory piece delivered with the calm of a man who no longer needs you to believe him.

Wave Gods brings a younger star and a legendary producer into the same three minutes and both earn it. Meet Joe Black is the pure technical exercise. Dedicated closes on something like warmth. The limits are obvious and mostly chosen. There is no subject, several verses run on grievance about respect he feels he is owed, and a couple of the tracks are sketches. Nothing here is going to change anybody's ranking of his catalog. Taken as an off season release from a man who has nothing left to prove, it is a clean, satisfying thirty minutes.