The Let down: Albums

A Perfect Circle are way too talented a group of artists to record a god-damned cover album! Why?

Now hear me out: Lupe Fiasco is one of the premier MCs in the game, but this outing suffered a long arduous public battle with his label to be more "commercially appealing". Sadly, it shows. Tracks like "Out of My Head" (featuring Trey Songz) just do not put Lupe's talent to good use. I try not to employ stagnant thinking when it comes to artists taking risks musically, (even if the preverbal loaded gun maybe pointed at their head) but this fails in my opinion.

(Amazingly, even though this isn't Lupe's best work, this album is still light years ahead of many MCs working today.)

We are LASERS!

I think that being a big Wu-Tang Clan fan makes me a little bias at times. Other times I may have impossible expectations for any Wu album. (I imagine any dedicated fan goes through such a dilemma.) The responsibilities of being a true and honest fan though, in my opinion, comes when one of your favourite artist(s) releases a subpar album, and being able to call them on it. This is one of those insistences

The Game gets a lot of flack for being a constant name dropper on his songs, and for good reason, it is pretty damn annoying. Nevertheless, that fact alone doesn't necessarily make him a bad rapper. This album, although, leaves something to be desired, sadly. After the amazing debut that was The Documentary, the follow up was going to be next to impossible to surpass. Maybe it was just another Hip Hop sophomore curse?

If Snoop stopped rapping after Doggystyle I wouldn't even be mad at him. What was this?

I have always been skeptical about cover albums. Sure a song or two, but an entire album? Maybe it was the song choices that turned me off, or possibly I had the feeling that this would be Rage's final album made me dislike it even more. They went out with a wimpier not a bang.

Ah, the metal gods, Metallica. They can do no wrong. We all know that Lars damaged Metallica's image by attacking the file sharing community, but that is a minor infraction in the grand scheme of things. Right? Now what happened here is anybody's guess. I'll attempt to take a shot at it though: Based on the Some Kind of Monster documentary every member of the group had a hand of penning the lyrics among other tasks. "What's the big deal? All groups do that, right?" You may question. Apparently, not Metallica. Hetfeild always took care of those things almost single handedly. Just this small change affected an entire album. Who knew?

Let's put the following sentences in prospective:

On his following album Recovery (2010), Eminem makes reference to Relapse and criticizes it in the second verse of the song "Not Afraid": "In fact, let's be honest/ That last Relapse CD was 'ehh'/ Perhaps I ran them accents into the ground/ Relax, I ain't going back to that now".[115] He expresses further criticism of the album in the song "Cinderalla Man", saying "Fuck my last CD, that shit's in my trash".[116]

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relapse_(Eminem_album)

What was this? As much as a Wu-Tang and Co. fanboy that I am I could not get behind this album. I felt that it had no direction. Sure, "La Rumba", "Brooklyn Babies", and "The Sickness" jam, but three tracks out of fifteen? Come on RZA!

"She Wants to Move" is the ONLY track worth listening to! How could this be?!