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While many will no doubt have set the bar of their expectations too high, Jay-Z has pulled out all of the stops on Kingdom Come.
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"Kingdom Come" is everything you expected.
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Kingdom Come follows the same sturdy formula as The Black Album, Reasonable Doubt, and The Blueprint, with a minimum of guests, a reasonable running time, and trendy beats from top producers. But the urgency just isn't there.
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80People who hate the venality and misogyny of modern mainstream rap will find this a particularly joyless experience, but this unwavering and energising disc at least has the courage of its convictions and makes the immediate competition look like the mealy mouthed twats they are.
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80At 37, he's still at the top of his game.
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80The album doesn't reach the heights of the seminal Black Album but is an exciting opener to a hectic schedule for Def Jam.
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Four duds out of 14 tracks isn't a fireable offense. But shouldn't the corner-office mogul demand more of his top earner?
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70This is far from being a bad album - Jay has never made one of those, nor given the impression he is capable of doing so - but it rarely rises to the levels he has consistently reached.
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On Kingdom Come, the highs are really high, and the lows are really low.
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70His ambitions and self-awareness have grown nearly as much as his net worth. [2 Dec 2006]
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70Kingdom Come is a solid record, and entirely worth the cost just to hear Jay-Z spit a new song, but in the end it just can't live up the expectations it tattoos all over itself.
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At its best, Kingdom Come is about possibility. At its worst, it pales in comparison to past albums.
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If he wants to save hip-hop, as he claims, Jay-Z needs to think beyond his usual game. He has the smarts and experience; perhaps his next comeback will show more royal ambition.
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60Whilst a gift for converting arrogance into entertainment has always been one of Jay-Z's strongest suits, Kingdom Come skirts perilously close to the showboating that marred 2002's bloated double album, The Blueprint 2.
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60He never quite rises to this lofty occasion, and without anything to prove other than that he can come back whenever he pleases, he reverts to gloating. [Jan/Feb 2007, p.81]
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Kingdom Come is exactly the kind of rote product Jay-Z seemed to want to avoid when he "retired": It's a victory lap without a victory, a rare instance of a rap superstar blowing his own horn and yet sounding half-hearted about it.
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50He's grown up, alright. With the energy Jay brings to most of these tracks, you'd think 30 was the new 60.
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A display of complacency and retreads.
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If all of Jigga's future records sound as labored and flat as Kingdom Come, do we really need him back?
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Kingdom Come is Jay-Z at his least inspired, and, yes, that includes the R. Kelly collaborations.
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"Kingdom Come," then, captures the sound of a grown-up rapper trying to make a grown-up album -- whatever that means. It's a fascinating experiment, and a halfway successful one.
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Its problems are both wide-reaching and acute, an album full of tiny misfired rhymes and shiny-dildo drum hits that add up to what I'll go ahead and label Jigga's second worst record, after 2002's abysmal The Blueprint 2.0.
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20Jay proves that, yes, he really has nothing more to say except to state the fact that he's back.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 34 out of 48
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Mixed: 4 out of 48
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Negative: 10 out of 48
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MusicLover10
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305Dade10