Maybe his breakthrough hit "Tell Me When to Go" was a threat, as the Bay Area slang king known as
E-40 has kept a brutally prolific release schedule since 2011. It was then he released a quadrilogy of albums with
Revenue Retrievin': Day Shift,
Night Shift,
Overtime Shift, and
Graveyard Shift all landing within the year, then
The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil 1 landed in 2012, kicking off a series that would drop no less than six albums over the next two years. The 2014 release
Sharp on All 4 Corners: Corner 1 (a sharp, minimal, and mean effort) set in motion another quadrilogy that used The Block Brochure's two-year roll-out plan, but this second
Corner arrived right alongside, offering a more uneven, although more outgoing, batch of tunes. Compared to the lean and calculated
Corner 1,
Corner 2 butts redundant numbers together and plays for the radio with
DeJ Loaf and
Luigi the Singer pulling "Baddest in the Building" toward
Chris Brown territory, while "Real Nigga" with
Kirko Bangz sounds like it was pieced together from worthy
T.I.,
T-Pain, and maybe even
TLC numbers. Most everything else plays out like all-the-way live posse cuts with names like
Mack 10,
B-Legit, and
Turf Talk all hitting hard, then there's the key cut "Sleep" where
Ludacris and
Plies join for a fantastic mashing of the cloud rap and gangsta rap genres.
Sharp on All 4 Corners: Corner 2 suffers mostly from having a superior effort released right next to it, but with
Corner 1 being such a narrow and low album,
E-40's more hedonistic and hyphy fans might find this sweet relief.