Whilst not really being worth much of an intense listen, it is perfect background music – and doesn’t really flag at any point, other than his quite ridiculous ode to stomachs on “Yo Stomach.” As for subject matter, diversity is the name of the game – whether it be the good times (“Buy You A Drank”), the bad times (HIV story “Suicide”), the sexy times (“Back Seat” – no explanation necessary) or clever concepts (the excellent almost Bowie-esque “Time Machine”), they all do the job effectively enough. The production he lays down is certainly solid and consistent throughout.
His half-singing/half-rapping is much more effective, whilst his Auto-Tuned (not Vocoder, slap on the wrist for me) voice does grow charming. To be perfectly honest, his rapping isn’t the best – lyrically he is perfectly competent, and has improved since his debut, but he simply doesn’t have a natural voice for it. That isn’t to say that there lies a stack of massive hits on here, but it displays a genuinely creative artist/producer that is entering “the zone.” On the old “NBA Jam” when a player was on such a hot streak that he was “on fire,” this is T-Pain lining up the shot that sets him alight. The album certainly makes good on the promise his pretty solid debut, and it is to the credit of “Epiphany” that if you weren’t aware of the singles, “Buy You A Drank” would have blended in quite seamlessly with the rest of the tracks on here. You see, “Epiphany” went to the top of the Billboard charts, even beating Rihanna’s slow-burning gigantosaurus “Good Girl Gone Bad.” It hasn’t sold a truly stellar amount, considering how prolific a guest artist he has since become – perhaps we have here an artist that values making a consistent album from start to finish rather than an average one with one hot single. They were right to push him just that bit further. So he went away, probably in a huff, and subsequently made “Buy You A Drank” – which turned out to be a mega-single. T-Pain recently admitted that he finished his sophomore album, presented it to his record company, and they “requested” a finger-snapping first single. They started talking and hit it off – thus, justifying my shameless actions. He protested, he resisted – but my superior height and weight advantage enabled me to shove him far enough. For example, I recently had to physically push my (never otherwise) shy friend in the direction of a good-looking girl that had been checking him out. Sometimes we are caught in between what we want to do, and what others think is best.
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