Sharp on All 4 Corners: Corner 2

Maybe his breakthrough hit "Tell Me When to Go" was a threat, as the Bay Area slang king known as E-40 has kept a brutally prolific release schedule since 2011. It was then he released a quadrilogy of albums with Revenue Retrievin': Day Shift, Night Shift, Overtime Shift, and Graveyard Shift all landing within the year, then The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil 1 landed in 2012, kicking off a series that would drop no less than six albums over the next two years. The 2014 release Sharp on All 4 Corners: Corner 1 (a sharp, minimal, and mean effort) set in motion another quadrilogy that used The Block Brochure's two-year roll-out plan, but this second Corner arrived right alongside, offering a more uneven, although more outgoing, batch of tunes. Compared to the lean and calculated Corner 1, Corner 2 butts redundant numbers together and plays for the radio with DeJ Loaf and Luigi the Singer pulling "Baddest in the Building" toward Chris Brown territory, while "Real Nigga" with Kirko Bangz sounds like it was pieced together from worthy T.I., T-Pain, and maybe even TLC numbers. Most everything else plays out like all-the-way live posse cuts with names like Mack 10, B-Legit, and Turf Talk all hitting hard, then there's the key cut "Sleep" where Ludacris and Plies join for a fantastic mashing of the cloud rap and gangsta rap genres. Sharp on All 4 Corners: Corner 2 suffers mostly from having a superior effort released right next to it, but with Corner 1 being such a narrow and low album, E-40's more hedonistic and hyphy fans might find this sweet relief. ~ David Jeffries