Instrumental Beats Hip Hop

2Pac broke out Hip Hop's first double album with 1996's All Eyez On Me, and ten years later MF Grimm dropped Hip Hop's first triple album with American Hunger. If the pattern continues, might we even see Hip Hop's first quadruple album in 2016?

And with this whole triple album talk we are brought to our latest from one of Hip Hop's best immovable rocks - a Soul of Mischief, a Hieroglyphic, a cousin of Ice Cube - he is Del Tha Funkee Homosapien. And Golden Era is his shot at this triple-album shit.

The beats are...well, beats. Produced solely by Del himself and employing a fairly consistent lo-fi approach in his production, you will find some sweet bass lines (and synth bass) and occasional sampled keyboard and guitar riffs here, but you won't find many melodies that these are put into; you'll find solid drums, but you won't really find any abstract drum patterns that deviate from traditional Hip Hop. However, all these do provide a very interesting and somewhat different take on West Coast Hip Hop, as that trademark old school sunshine bounce gets laced with a musical smog (probably all the distortion), then twisted and yanked down underground into an oddly cosy sewer...and finds a lot of charm here.

There's no doubting that they provide much more than the bare minimum canvas for flows as all these instruments come together nicely but still, a significant number of these instrumentals are quite simply loops replayed after 4 or 8 bars. Of course that's not really anything new for Hip Hop, nor is it necessarily a bad thing; but when it is bad it is because you become very aware that you are hearing these beats being looped over and over again, and this repetition is just one of those things that brings your finger or cursor to the "Skip Track" button.

So what's the best way to keep your listener listening? Well, since you're the sole artist rhyming on these three discs which have a joint running time of almost two and a half hours, you need to maintain good form in your verses. Luckily, Del has the smooth voice, tight flow and consistently well-above-par lyricism that keeps your ear hooked to his voice (even if it does often sound like it's been recorded on a reject shop mic). Though he doesn't traverse any new grounds here, his charmingly geeky references paired up with an unmistakeable persona that just wants a good ol' battle with any takers doesn't tire quickly, but with prolonged single listen it does eventually grow thin and begin to feel like it's just running on fumes.

Unless you need a collection of music from a single artist to hold you down for two-hour-long+ drug trip, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien's Golden Era is best listened to in intervals, a non-consecutive disc by disc experience. For its length it is indeed a very solid effort from one of Hip Hop's martians who needs not refer to himself as one because when you listen to him, you know. Who else in Hip Hop could put out a triple album and not make a total disaster of it?