Nastradamus Review

The title promises prophecy. What arrives is a rapper who has run out of time, working from a pile of leftovers and a release date somebody else picked. The seams are not hidden. Beats that would have been demos on any other record get full arrangements. Hooks are handed to guests who sound bored. You Owe Me is the low point and a genuinely strange one, a slick radio play about being owed sex that is written with none of the wit he brings to worse subjects. The title track builds an apocalypse out of nothing in particular and never explains what it is warning about.

Big Girl is a well meant idea with no craft under it. There are flickers. Project Windows is a real song about looking down at a courtyard and counting the people who did not make it, and Life We Chose has a decent late night pulse. Those two are enough to prove he could still write, which somehow makes the rest worse rather than better. Twenty seven years on, defenders keep arguing it is merely mediocre rather than a catastrophe. That is the strongest case anybody has made for it, and it is the correct one.