Album Review: Xzibit - Napalm

Rule number one when selling things on eBay – put 'vintage' in the item description. People love that shit. Retro appeal – or the promise of it – will work wonders for the sales potential of toys, scarves and household items. One cannot, sadly, apply the same rule to the release of contemporary media, and this is where Xzibit AKA Mr X-to-tha-Zee AKA The Asbestos Oesophagus's latest album falls down.

Napalm is by no means a terrible album, but it is a dated one. People demand more than boom-bap and balls out aggression from their hip hop in 2012. It's not that the roster lacks talent or a certain calibre (in the East corner, Prodigy of Mobb Deep; in the West King Tee and Tha Alkaholiks), but you could pull Napalm off the shelf in JB Hi-Fi, take a look at the back, give it a listen (nodding along to Louis XIII and Dos Equis, and perhaps quietly appreciating 1983), without being able to correctly identify where in X's catalogue it fits, or even where in the last ten years. Most listeners would guess wrongly.

If those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it, then those that rely too much on it are destined never to equal it. Paparazzi played on The Sopranos and his verse on My Writes was a highlight on a modern classic. There's no doubt Xzibit has made some great joints in his 20-year career, the problem is none of them are here. Napalm is hard to put down, and it's hot. Napalm isn't, and it's not.