Album Review: This Time by Beanie Sigel

Like his key effort The Reason (2005), This Time is another pre-prison album from Beanie Sigel. Big difference is that last time out, it was year and a day on federal weapons charges (gangster stuff, and at a fed level), while this time its two years for failing to file taxes on his one-million-plus income (flossy and fed, but not so gangster). Regardless of the charge, this sharp and inspired album is further proof that Beanie feeds on that hard-time-coming pressure, but he's more in the Wesley Snipes zone than Pablo Escobar territory here, and that glorious, urban dream depicted on the cover comes right through the speakers.

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Beanie Sigel can rhyme. He can tell stories and elicit emotion from the listener. That much has been evident from tracks like “This Can’t Be Life” earlier on in his career. One thing Sigel can’t do, it seems, is stay out of his own way. Soon after the his latest album, This Time, Beans is ….

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Beanie Sigel recorded This Time in a matter of weeks, just before reporting for a two-year prison sentence for tax evasion. The circumstances are sadly familiar to those surrounding his last truly great record, 2005's The B. Coming, which he recorded in the time remaining before he served a year and a day for federal weapons charges. Things weren't exactly rosy for the Philly rapper back then, but in the rearview they look like salad days: He was still affiliated with Roc-A-Fella, still privy to a house-production roster that included Just Blaze.

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Beanie Sigel reinforces his reputation as a lyrical beast on This Time. The Broad Street Bully dives right in with the album’s title track, a story of tribulation and redemption, including Beans documenting his tumultuous fall from grace. “I went from caviar dreams to champagne sippin’/Back to Four Lokos, four wings fried crispy,” the veteran Philadelphia rhyme slinger spits on the record.

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