The Melodic Blue Review

As an object it is beautifully made. Beat switches arrive constantly, sometimes twice inside a song, and the sound palette is unusually rich for a modern rap album, muted strings and treated vocals and drums that keep changing weight. Family Ties is the obvious event, a two part track where the guest verse is the most aggressive thing that rapper had done in years, and it is genuinely exciting.

Range Brothers is a joke that runs long and is funnier for it. Issues and Scapegoats are where the writing goes somewhere, both about a childhood he circles rather than describes. 16 is lovely. The limitation is focus, because the constant switching means very few songs build to anything, and by the end you have heard a great deal of invention without quite hearing an album. Enormous promise, brilliantly produced, and the emotional centre is still under construction.