Type: Album
Score: 7/10
Date modified: Dec 26, 2025
Despite this being one of the first hiphop albums I listened to when I really started getting into music, it just hit me that I had completely forgotten to write anything down about it. When I started on this whole music thing I was a little overwhelmed so lots of my recommendations came from mainly Youtubers and I heard Fantano talking about this album in some list he made so I decided to give it a shot. Up to that point I'd only heard of this album in places where people spoke of it as if it was some sort of almost mythical creature, like you could categorise time as pre-Madvillainy and post-Madvillainy. I know I'm getting a little dramatic here but so were they leading to my expectations of this album being high to such a degree that no matter what it actually sounded like I'd have probably ended up disappointed, and unfortunately that's exactly what happened. It didn't help that up to that point the only full album I'd heard was IGOR which remains top five for me so my bar for what an album should be like had been set wayy too high. My disappointment could've also been because this is kind of more of an acquired taste than other stuff I'd listened to, I know this is far from being niche but it's also not particularly close to what my dad was listening to on the radio growing up.
Anyways, I've danced around actually sharing what I think for long enough and I hope all that preamble will be enough to stop people from tearing me to pieces like the old lady in Weapons for giving this "just" a seven. I'd love to give it higher but even as I relisten to it today I still have lingering disappointment. Obviously that's out of Madlib and DOOM's hands but was still to the detriment of this project. Oops, guess I didn't get to the point after all. What they could control though was how much downtime I felt like this project had, the cartoon audio clips never did anything for me and just felt like they were slowing this thing down, so did the abundance of interlude tracks, I'm fine with one or two but this shit has ~6 (depending what you consider an interlude), it felt like I get to listen to two proper songs (which were always really good, don't get me wrong) before all the momentum was destroyed by a boring interlude. I know this is was pretty slow-paced album in the first place, this isn't any Femtanyl shit but holy fuck I cannot emphasise how much these interludes kills the mood. This album is also pretty front-loaded too, the first half has some absolute bangers like America's most Blunted, Curls and Accordion with just about every proper song apart from Rainbows being good but the second half really doesn't do that much for me, it has like Money Folder, Fancy Clown and All Caps but that's really about it for what I enjoyed. It also has Shadows of Tomorrow and what even is that song guys, are we so for real?
I didn't really mean to do so much complaining, the beats and rapping on this thing were usually good but it just felt bloated to me despite being only 46 minutes long which is never a good sign, if it had been a little more to the point and got rid of those cartoon clips I'd have liked it a lot more.