Tha Carter V

If anything lets Tha Carter V down, it’s the track sequencing and transitions, which can start to make the project feel like it’s dragging about halfway through. However, that should hardly dissuade Wayne’s most diehard fans, as even in its slowest moments, the album never loses its heady sense of rapture. ... The album is indeed memorable, as much for the journey that led to its release as the previously unseen layers that Weezy reveals.

The good news: Musically, despite the age of some of the songs, V is fresh, flush and even frenetic at times, with the crunch of the Southern trap and ropey rap-rock sounds that Wayne pretty much started in the first place.

Like any fifth installment in a series, you’re going to need to care about those early entries to care about this one, and, at 90 minutes, it’s way more than anyone needs. But the highlights are so many--Mannie Fresh reunion “Start This Shit Off Right,” gonzo Kendrick collab “Mona Lisa,” the mixtape-style freakout of “Let It Fly,” heartbreaking coda “Let It All Work Out”--that you sort of give him a pass on the duds.

The most surprising takeaway from Tha Carter V, it turns out, isn’t that Wayne still has music this vital in him. It’s that after all these years, there’s still more to learn about him.

For all the excess and buildup, this exhibits Wayne on an upswing, lucid and invigorated.

Relationships with women are at the forefront of Tha Carter V, including a desperate cry for help from his mother on "I Love You Dwayne," which leads into the sorrowful "Don't Cry," featuring a chorus from the late XXXTENTACION. ... Despite the revelations, the album is not without its expected bangers.

What we have is an album that’s mostly pretty good. It’s certainly an improvement over Tha Carter IV--likely his least memorable album ever--but it’s also not a record that is going to reignite a second peak from Wayne, if that was the hope.

Tha Carter V can’t compare to the first three Carter installments, or his epochal 2005-2007 mixtape run. But it doesn’t need to.

Wayne is, by nature, an exciting rapper. His breathless, consistently accelerating flow is still present here, though not varied enough to work as well as it used to. .... Ultimately, Tha Carter V sounds like someone chasing after their own glory days, with half-hearted energy, barely even believing themselves.

After the long wait it’s not a disappointing effort, but it’s all over the place.

It’s not that C5 is too little, too late; more that the baton between the generations passed some time ago.

Excess was always a part of his proposition, but this album drags and seeps, with long stretches of shrug in between moments of invention.