Pitchfork

This should be great. On albums like 1995's All Balls Don't Bounce, Freestyle Fellowship veteran Aceyalone developed an enormously likable rap style, a big-hearted and joyous lope, jumping in and out of beats and letting loose with gooshy, wide-eyed innocence and an effortless flair. For this album, he's teamed with Rjd2, a producer whose work with rappers usually isn't great but whose instrumental work is perhaps the most gorgeous and expansive in underground hip-hop. These guys have both done beautiful things in the past, so it follows that their collaborative effort should be amazing. Well, um, it isn't.

Instead, Magnificent City is lazy and inept, devoid of force and inspiration and chemistry. Aceyalone sounds as if the decade-plus he's spent kicking around West Coast backpack-rap has stolen the wonderfully warm playfulness that used to just drip off him. He's become broken, almost cynical. More to the point, he's lost his distinctiveness. These days, he sounds almost exactly like his vastly inferior stylistic descendent Murs; a couple of times, I had to check the tracklisting to make sure I wasn't actually hearing a Murs guest appearance. Many of the songs on Magnificent City fit a pre-established connect-the-dots blueprint: the weed song, the I-want-everything song, the birth narrative. Others have lame, one-note concepts, like "Supahero", which, duh, is about how he is not a superhero. He doesn't sound excited to be rapping; his vocals are flatter than ever, and his lines are often painful ("Aceyalone, but you can call me Acey/ I'm a real OG like Count Basie/ Hook up the recipe so nice and tasty/ When I'm done, they screaming out, 'Aceyalone, lace me'"). The best I can say about Acey here is that he raps on-beat. Most of the time.

For his part, Rj pulls off a couple of nice tricks, like the strutting horns and chicken-scratch guitars of "All For U" and the rolling bass and jingling percussion of "Caged Bird". But he's reigned in his tendencies toward big-canvas atmospheric funk, and so his tracks come off sounding pedestrian and unambitious. And when Rj blows it, as with the faux-Timbaland oscillating synth blips of "Mooore", Acey isn't exactly there to pick up the slack. We deserve better from these guys.