NOE - Gone Till Noevember (DJ 4Five / G14)

NOE has released so many mixtapes in the last year or two, really has been on his grind. But a lot of them overlap in terms of songs, and this one has some of the same songs as Noestradamus, so I kinda decided to just listen to this one and skip that one. Don't know if I picked the better one, but this is really dope, maybe the most consistent NOE tape I've heard to date. It's kinda padded out with a lot of the Jim Jones records he was on, and of course nobody wants to hear Jim Jones rap, but there are a lot of good solo cuts. Even as a freestyle-heavy mixtape I'm not that mad at it, good interesting beat selection. I wouldn't stick my neck out to say NOE is a better rapper than Jay right now, but since Jay just gets worse and worse every year and NOE is steadily improving, I know who I'd rather hear a new record from right now. You can download it at bmorehiphop.com/noe.

NOE - "Boom Bye Bye" (mp3)
It took me a second to recognize this beat, and then I realized that it's a 6-year-old Lloyd Banks song, "Warrior Part 2," that I really loved at the time, and haven't heard in years. I still kinda can't believe Eminem produced it, it's just so much better than most of his other beats. In fact, I wrote about it in the really really early days of Government Names. A while later in the mixtape NOE raps over one of my other favorite 2004 beats, J-Kwon's "Hood Hop."

Labels: ALLBMOREHIPHOP.COM, mixtape/album review, mp3, NOE