A year after his debut, Beanie Sigel returns with another album that follows the formula of the previous one. Just Blaze is the lead producer with nearly half the beats, Kanye West and Rick Rock produce two each, the other rhythms are created by 88-Keys, Bernard "Big Demi" Parker, Sha-Self and No ID. The guests include State Property rappers Freeway, Young Chris and Omillio Sparks, Jay-Z, Memphis Bleek, Rell, Scarface, Kurupt and Daz Dillinger.
Sigel's second disc starts like the previous one, the first track is produced by Kanye West, the second beat is provided by Just Blaze. West kicks off the project with an excellent beat on "Nothing Like It." The cut is an easy winner, Kanye at his best places a soulful rhythm in the middle of the chipmunk soul era taking a sample from "Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing" by The Dynamic Superiors, good bass line, poor light drum, delivery in full confidence by Sigel who carves out one of the many solid tracks of his discography. Just Blaze aims hard for radio airplay with "Beanie (Mack Bitch), such a bad production that it's reminiscent of some mainstream Neptunes beats. "So What You Saying" welcomes the album's first guest, Memphis Bleek, on the second production provided by Just Blaze. The beat, cheerful and light-hearted, is better than the previous one, although not totally good: the entire song is a direct cover of the EPMD song "So Wat Cha Sayin'", with Sigel and Bleek swapping verses like Parrish and Erick for five minutes.
Just Blaze finds one of his most inspired productions in "Get Down", its third in a row and also the last in the first part, the boy leaves room for the others behind the keyboards and returns to the end of the disc. Cinematic, gloomy, dark rhythm, vibrant midtempo drum, excellent samples, good musical carpet for Sigel's rough and energetic rap. It could be a simple coincidence, but the end of the beats provided by Just Blaze coincides with a sharp drop in the quality of the music: Rick Rock's beat for "I Don't Do Much" is bad, Sigel doesn't save the track. Rick Rock also produces the next track and it's another flop in trying to make a mainstream pop hit, despite the presence of guests Daz Dillinger and Kurupt (the latter uncredited for any reason), or Tha Dogg Pound, here to help Sigel expand its market to the West Coast as well. The boys are only present for intro (Daz) and outro (Daz & Kurupt) and they have neither verses nor hooks for some inexplicable reason.
Choice number seven turns out to be a bit more forced than usual: over stuttering, rambling music crafted by 88-Keys, Sigel launches himself into the broad territory of misogyny in what turns out to be a useless filler in a hardcore album. "Think It's a Game" rests its foundations on the solid concrete of Roc-A-Fella, in one of the last productions in Bernard "Big Demi" Parker's career. The music is mediocre, the hook of Saint Nick is honest, but the drum struggles to flow on the track. Beans is joined by his boss Jay-Z and the guys from State Property Freeway and Young Chris, for what appears to be an obligatory posse to listen to on his record: Hova strives, the others are doing well, but the music isn't good enough to give these six minutes replay value. "Man's World" takes the sample from the James Brown song, it adds urgent and frenetic sounds to it and transforms it into an ideal sound carpet for a new track about women by Beanie Sigel, which lives on a typical dichotomy of gangsta rap songs: the lyrics suck, while the music is good enough for you to carry the track through to the end.
Kurupt is guest credited in "Gangsta, Gangsta", where he recites the chorus on a Kanye West production which clearly sounds like one of his rejects and it doesn't matter, because Sigel picks it up anyway and spits on it: to the detriment of the title, the song is more bravado and hardcore than gangster, but that doesn't matter. "Tales of a Hustler" makes its way as one of the highlights of this project: Sha-Self finds a great rhythm supported by the call of whales (?) or similar sound in the background, Omillio Sparks kills the track with a powerful and personal delivery in the first verse, one of his best contributions ever on a record, Sigel goes strong and completes one of the strongest tracks on the album. After leaving a quarter of an hour from the start, Just Blaze returns for the final dozen minutes, producing the last three songs.
The first is "Mom Praying", where Scarface returns to duet with Sigel after the Philadelphia emcee's previous album, and he delivers a great personal verse on an excellent production of Just Blaze (Kanye West had his own song with the same sample, but he scrapped it after Blaze used it for this track), which takes a sample from The Dramatics' "It Ain't Rainin' (On Nobody's House But Mine)". There's another beautiful sample for "Still Got Love for You", it's "Ike's Mood 1" by Isaac Hayes, splendid. Inside Jay-Z and singer Rell alongside Beanie Sigel in a soulful sequel to "Where Have You Been" from Jay-Z's "The Dynasty" album, in which the boys discuss their relationships with their fathers. The disc ends with "What Your Life Like 2", sequel to the song featured in Sigel's debut, in which the Philaldephia rapper picks up where he left off on the other track and delivers bars on the same theme on an ethereal and melancholic production, sensational, which uses a sample of a late seventies disco song, "Quasimodo's Marriage" by Alec R. Costandinos.
Released by Roc-A-Fella and Def Jam, the album replicates the charts of the previous one and its sales results are comforting, while the critical reception is more lukewarm than that of the public. Unlike most sophomore albums, Beanie Sigel manages to improve himself with a product that is slightly superior to the previous one, while maintaining a production anchored to the modern and soulful Roc-A-Fella sound, and themes related to gangsta rap and the hardcore subgenre, such as crimes, hustling, street, violence, drugs, gratuitous misogyny, socio-conscious, personal traits and even club-directed tunes. The CD is solid in the first quarter of an hour and in the last quarter of an hour, both conditioned by the production of Just Blaze, suffering especially around the midsection, when the effort is rendered incoherent by one's willingness to explore different musical directions. After joining the label, Sigel tries to get as many kids out of Philly neighborhoods as possible, Freeway comes first, then all the others, Oschino, Omillio Sparks and the Young Gunz duo made up of Chris and Neef. Executed with an energetic style, the record is one of the strongest released by Roc-A-Fella and in broad strokes it showcases Beanie Sigel's full potential as the label's top rapper.
Rating: 7.4/10.
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