Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty

On Sir Lucious Left Foot, Big Boi does something even more difficult: He gives us a great album that sounds nothing like any of the great albums he's already given us. From where I'm sitting, that's an even greater achievement.

A succession of enjoyable songs with plenty to offer.

The fact that this album feels so complete even without any words from his old partner reinforces just what peak form Big Boi is in.

Though his partner is absent, this sounds and feels like another OutKast experience--a welcome one.

Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty isn't just an expertly produced and performed slab of brilliantly odd, futuristic dance music. It isn't just the best rap album of the year so far.

It's a record which brilliantly lives up to and even exceeds all the hype, mystique and hyperbole that has surrounding it since it's inception, and it's essential for anyone with even a fleeting interest in rap music.

As the name may suggest, it's a daring, sprawling effort that simultaneously ventures beyond hip-hop and celebrates the genre's very history.

Freed from the aesthetic demands of an odd-couple partnership, Big Boi (Antwan Patton) improves on the standard set with 2003's Speakerboxxx, an ostensibly solo work crystallized inside a double-album set, delivering a record that's rigidly focused and almost uniformly strong.

It's one of the loosest, most varied, and entertaining albums of its time.

That OutKast comeback will surely be killer, but for now respect is due the way of this splendid solo adventure.

The album bubbles over with insidious grooves, inventive samples, and lissome rhyming about things frivolous and fraught.

Big Boi isn't an MC; he's a songwriter. That distinction is what separates him from other rappers, and it's what makes Sir Lucious--an album whose elan is instantaneously felt and whose spirit only becomes more invigorated with each listening--such a pleasure.

Big Boi has exquisite taste in music, guests, lyrics and choruses--not to mention the knowledge and expertise of how to put a classic album together. And whoever bet against him just lost. Big time.

Aided by producers Organized Noize and Mr. DJ, Sir Lucious Left Foot is a monster of an album.

Sir Lucious is all but hiccup-free, exceptionally consistent in its mad musical mission. Each track on the record is an explosive standalone statement within a greater unifying framework; it's an album, but these songs are pipe bombs.

The resulting, mercifully final product is, as you might have suspected all along, fantastic, by turns triumphant, defiant, and gleefully crass.

The cameos (T.I., Janelle Monáe, Gucci Mane) hit all the right spots, the skits are delightfully juvenile, and Big Boi's idiosyncratic delivery and tightrope cadences throughout teeter toward Jedi mind tricks. Stank you very much.

Backstreet spawn aside, it may finally be settling in that Sir Lucious Left Foot does gather itself around Big Boi enough to make it the best OutKast-related release since the duo dropped Aquemini a dozen years ago (we can debate its merits next to the incredible six tracks or so on the bloated Stankonia, sure). For a Kast fan, this is life-affirming.

Here, he recruits a cast of producers ranging from the familiar (Dungeon Family compatriots Mr. DJ and Organized Noize) to the surprisingly appropriate (Scott Storch, Lil Jon) to craft a palette of dexterous futurist funk that seems to be a logical successor to the groundwork laid by 2003's Speakerboxxx.

Tasty cuts abound here, but Sir Lucious is most enjoyable as a complete listening experience.

It's no mean feat for him to drop a solo album that's both a trove of pop jams and a profound piece of artistic experimentation, and he's done just that--a remarkable achievement by any measurement.

Big Boi delivers an inventive, high-spirited set full of synth-funk signifiers, talk-box flair and snares.

Big Boi's absurd--and absurdly dextrous--verbiage knits it all together handsomely. [Sep 2010, p.85]

It's eclectic, electrifying, eccentric and more than a little bit ludicrous, but Sir Lucious's ambition is as infectious as its madness is dazzling.

What's finally made it is an expansive, guest-packed 57 minutes that recall the Southern hip-hop bounce of 2003's 'Speakerboxxx', but with an added twist of maturity.

The album is the product of a consistent vision, synthesizing hip-hop's beat architecture and sound manipulation with bespoke funk playing. [Sep 2010, p.50]

Throughout its 12 quality tracks, it's interesting enough to engage listeners and engaging enough to keep the listeners interested. It's a step well above most of the hip-hop that has been released in recent years and will be played frequently until a new OutKast album materializes.

Freed from the aesthetic demands of an odd-couple partnership, Big Boi (Antwan Patton) improves on the standard set with 2003's Speakerboxxx, an ostensibly solo work crystallized inside a double-album set, delivering a record that's rigidly focused and almost uniformly strong.

You're left with an album from which ideas continually gush forth in a torrent.

He possesses flawless rap skills, artiness, tasty hooks and smart production. There are lots of strong tracks, but his debut is highly enjoyable as a complete listening experience.

It's full of surface charm, the type of music that is designed to sound big in a club, the soundtrack for a night of excess. But there's very little conventional about these beats and the way Big Boi nimbly spreads his living-large imagery over them.