The R.E.D. Album Review

Reviews split hard here and several of the loudest were unkind, mostly about the guest count and the sense of a record assembled rather than written. Both complaints are fair. Twenty one tracks, a guest on most of them, and Dre sold as the executive presence before turning up as four interludes and one verse on Drug Test. What the harsher reads underweight is how well it plays.

The board is deep and it swings: a Pharrell beat on Mama Knows, DJ Premier on Born in the Trap, Hit-Boy, Cool and Dre, DJ Khalil, 1500 or Nothin', and a first third with the strongest sequencing of his career outside the debut. The City is the one that matters now, because it hands a long verse to a Compton kid a year before the rest of the country learned his name, and Game sounds glad to be outrapped on his own record.

Martians vs. Goblins is a genuinely odd swing that works. Pot of Gold is radio done properly. The writing is where it stalls, still built out of names and references rather than scenes, and the back half sags the way all his albums do. Graded on the run it actually has rather than the reputation it earned, this is good. The beats are better than good.