Release Date: 22 October 2021
Song Count: 18
Rating: 4.6/10
Description:
On his 32nd birthday, Brooklyn-born rapper and artist Barrington Hendricks, commonly known by his stage name JPEGMAFIA, released his fourth studio album, the final one of his published by the label Republic Records. That album is the one that graces our ears today, the "online" version of LP! released primarily for streaming services. LP!, alongside the matching releases prior to it such as EP! and EP2! earlier that year, came after a discographical hiatus and months of silence from the rapper's end, and so had a longer amount of time to cook in the oven before being released to the public.
LP! consists of 18 very varied tracks, primarily of JPEGMAFIA rapping and flowing atop a rap beat, with occasional interruptions and interludes of all kinds, making it difficult to predict where a track will go. Especially the instrumentals and sound mixing goes in all sorts of different directions even within singular tracks here. This extremely balls-to-the-wall approach to songmaking, naturally, has a mixed level of success in making for good songs, creating whacky yet creative and intense tracks when it hits and a disjointed, confused and messy product of musical experimentation by a mad scientist when it misses. There are some truly elevated highs alongside a pack of bottom-of-the-barrel lows all contained within this one album, and when listening in full, one really has to dig all the way to see what is worth the listen and what can be let go.
In general, while LP! has a few songs to offer that are both cohesive and interesting, in the grand picture, it doesn't add up to much compared to the amount of tracks that either fall flat on their faces or otherwise just exist without doing much else, and as such I didn't manage to garner as much enjoyment out of the album as perhaps others would have. If you're a frequent reader of the site, then here is a promise to you that as much as it looks like I may have a bias against hip-hop music due to rating a lot of albums from the genre relatively low, I do enjoy many works of the genre - the luck on this daily album challenge, when it comes to such albums, just hasn't been in my favour so far, and it's very much probable that if I dug more closely into more all-timer hip-hop works, I will be able to find more that I end up enjoying and rating higher.