Despite the legendary story behind Greedo, his newest release falls to capture any of that magic. This new release follows a cleaner sound from Greedo, ripe for the mainstream. Gone are those majestic California-based productions, or off-the-wall sampling techniques, but here comes a slew of mind-numbing producers to take suck the soul out. Across the thirty-three tracks, a regular quantity for the prolific MC, we see nothing of interest.
A release like this should be met with as much fanfare as possible, but it lacks his raw abilities. Greedo is known to have some the stickiest hooks, there’s a reason “Never Bend” blew up the way it did, but there’s truly nothing interesting about this one. Every track here sounds like a complete throwaway, something that would’ve been an unnoticeable deep cut on any of his previous releases.
03 Greedo – Never Bend
This could be because of his production choices as well that make his hooks blend in together. All of his previous releases have some of the most intriguing production you can find, and a good portion of it comes straight from himself in the form of self-production. Here he outsources that talent however, seeing beats from the likes of Bighead, Lex Luger, Sledgren & Harry Fraud to name a few. All extraordinary talents in their own right, they fall to make any waves of note throughout this lengthy tracklist.
All these sacrifices seemingly come to let his verses shine, where he rarely dips into his melodic bag & focuses more on giving straight & narrow verses. This could come off in a refreshing way, but the entire tracklist is filled with this. Without a breakaway, it becomes a mindless experience compared to the constant party-feel his old music gave.
The hope is that this more of a detour than a whole new direction. Considering he just released from prison, there could be an aspect of this where he was just focused on giving completely fresh material. To be free & get to record must be a feeling like no other. So hopefully, this is just a sign of better things to come.