High Times

Album review

To the mainstream hip-hop fan most, it seems like comet Young Dro -- aka comet Polo Dro -- only comes around once in a great while: the Grand Hustle member's debut, Best Thang Smokin', dropped in 2006, and this sophomore effort arrived in 2013. Underground fans know different, since the gruff-voiced, party-minded MC unleashed a suitcase worth of mixtapes in between the two, so don't be surprised that this "long-awaited" follow-up is a slow roller with street tracks because that's where Dro has been posted for some time. Still, tracks like the minimal, mean, and infectious-as-poison-ivy number "FDB" deserves to be lifted from the mixtape world and put on the turntable of every club, and if that weren't enough reason to make this one "official," when the aptly titled stoner anthem "Strong" comes on with a beat as quirky as its producer's name (Dijon "DJ Mustard" McFarlane), it's a number that must be put in the official archive and not lost to the underground. Dro is mainstream street and not as odd as his backbeats with lines like "I'm in the hotel with two lesbians, where the f*ck you all at?" being the kind of brazen baller talk that the rapper considers his comfort zone, but he slings slang, slurs words, and uses his Atlanta drawl to stretch insults into lazy putdowns that are devastating, so take all that into account. Take high-caliber kiss-offs like the guitar-crunching "Hammer Time" ("If a n*gga think he better, I forgive him") and "I'm Cold" ("I got money like the Clampetts, Jethro") into account as well, and think of High Times as a narrow, approachable, and no-crossover type of album, plus a good reason to go searching the Young Dro mixtape section at your neighborhood bootlegger or local Internet.
© David Jeffries /TiVo