Press Play

A cracking album that holds its own for almost the entire duration.

Press Play has something for most everyone: street raps, club jams, glossy R&B.

While it's far from the most important record in hip-hop in 2006, let alone in Diddy's career, it's one that does at least keep your interest the whole way through and is worth listening to more than once.

It's when Diddy adopts the role he's really good at, the executive producer - bringing together and overseeing the real talent - for the closing stages, that "Press Play" moves from being another chaotic and bloated stab at a rap career to being something approaching a great album.

Save for the unnecessary interludes, the strength of Press Play is in its ability to employ so many different styles, sounds, influences and mold them into one extremely coherent package.

Press Play works rather well. [Dec 2006, p.106]

The musical brilliance that surrounds him only serves to highlight Combs's shortcomings as a rapper.

"Play" is light-years more enterprising than Diddy's sample-happy history might suggest.

You could argue the all-star assemblage of "Press Play" - Diddy's first solo set in half a decade - would have been even stronger without the auteur's direct involvement, and certainly without his pedestrian rhymes about love and life.

A sprawled-out, futuristic tribute to Diddy's own celebrity.

Diddy still doesn't have an original bone in his body or a fresh idea in his head, and he relies on his previously successful formulas... but damn if it doesn't actually work.

It’s definitely an enjoyable listen, although that’s due to hot beats and great collaborators as much (or even more) as it’s due to Diddy himself.

An album that begins as a me-against-the-world celebration of self ends as a somber plea for emotional wholeness. [Dec 2006, p.173]

It certainly weaves a wide range of up-to-the-second pop styles into the mix: throwback '70s funkiness, dance music's two-step and drum 'n' bass, new-wave soul.... Still, he is no Prince.

Diddy’s rhymes are more adept than they used to be, but his flat voice and retro boasts drag things down.

Press Play is like an episode of My Super Sweet 16: though lavishly decorated and probably an honor to be invited to, there's a megalomaniacal presence that ensures the whole party is about glorification of ego rather than actual fun.

Granted, thanks to the kind of company Mr. Combs’ platinum chain reels in, almost half of these tracks have some modest amount of entertainment value to them, but all the Just Blazes and Rich Harrisons and Big Bois and Pharoahes and Kanyes and Nasirs in the world can’t cover the Proactiv-shiny mug up front, the shifty but proudly brand-name-not-person-name emblazoned on the border, the voice that bumbles through every song.