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 N***a" 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.