Last year I took a pop at Eminem for his super-speed verbal machine-gunning on Logic’s track 'Homicide', but I’ve now heard suggestions that he’s set a new syllables-per-minute world record on this new release. I’ll take his fans’ word for it, because life’s honestly too short to bother counting any more. No sense in encouraging him. It did tickle me, though, that the warp-drive lyrical section in question occurs right at the end of the track, for all the world like one of those sped-up disclaimer blurbs you get after radio adverts. “All loans subject to status. Terms and conditions apply…”

Setting snarky comments aside, I like the way the producers have improved the mileage of such a simple riff by adjusting its timbral make-up and arrangement. At the outset, you’d have been forgiven for expecting the synth bass at 0:02 to just continue through the timeline more or less unchanged, give or take a few flexes of the mute button, but already at 0:14 it becomes more complex, with the sound’s more characterful upper harmonics shifting up an octave while the sub-bass layer changes to a more ponderous rhythm. Then at 0:37 the upper synth component returns to its original register, we lose the sub-bass, and another more organic and ambient layer joins in (orchestral strings, perhaps?) — although that too is stripped away at 0:44. At 1:58 the upper synth component appears in its higher register without any sub-bass at all, and is further high-pass filtered at 2:21. There’s nothing ground-breaking in all this, but it’s very effective in providing section contrast and textural variety without losing the hook value of the riff repetitions. Shame that most project-studio hip-hop productions make scant use of it.