Oxnard
by Anderson .Paak

"Oxnard", Anderson .Paak's latest album reveals once again the plasticity of the American rapper and producer, his ability to merge the history of American black music into one piece: jazz, funk, disco, hip-hop and soul. Oxnard is the hometown of Anderson .Paak, a 32-year-old rapper, whose first step was to resurrect the soundtrack of the 1970s blaxploitation movies. After albums entitled Venice (2014) and Malibu (2016) , Oxnard closes a seaside trilogy, dedicated to the cities of the American West Coast. The pieces mix very diverse themes: dreams of glory in front of a mirror, a scene of sex lived on the highway while passing by the police violence and the criticism of Donald Trump, become almost an obligatory passage.

8/10

Best track: "Cheers (feat. Q-Tip)"

From poppmusic 12/30/2018 18:58 | #228344

Missed opportunity to cement himself as one of the greats, I feel like this is a spiritual successor to Dre's "Compton" album, with too few moments for Paak to shine, but here and there it's still great. Definitely best track is "Cheers", especially Q-Tip's excellent feature

From mdbaxter 12/19/2018 20:51 | #227459

This is a good album but I was waiting the whole album for it to be great and it didn't become what I thought it could be. The first half is all nice smooth .Paak (besides Tints, blatant radio bait). All enjoyable but there is something missing that could take them to the next level, I'm not sure what that is. Then comes Mansa Musa. Not a great track with a weak Dre feature but whatever. Brother's Keeper is where I thought it was going to pick up and it did, good song with a good feature and a great outro. The song with Snoop is also pretty good, Snoop being the driving force. The rest of the songs (excluding the outro) are almost ruined by poor, in my opinion, features. .Paak has moments of emotion that aren't matched by either other artist. J-Cole's verse is not good and doesn't fit the song. Q-Tip just changes the flow of the song, unnecessarily, after .Paak sets it up emotionally. The final track is boring pop that sounds like it was made for an NBA on TNT commercial. Overall, the features do a decent amount to take away from the quality of the album but .Paak is not without blame. I know he likes gangsta shit, as he says, but I think it would benefit the music in the future if he incorporated a little more soul into future projects as he has done in the past.

Favorites: Brother's Keeper, Anywhere

Fantastic album. A more diversified tracklist than Malibu, more energetic delivery, better concepts, and Paak is at his most charismatic and interesting here. The production and instrumentation is flawless and every track is hard hitting in a way.