Album Review: The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil, Pt. 1 by E-40

"I'm gonna keep it all-the-way hood; I been livin' in my third childhood lately/ Smokin' a lot of spinach lately, hanging out at the strip club lately." E-40 said this on 2010's "Undastandz Me", from his massive Revenue Retrievin' double album, and the line's a clue to the tremendous life force powering his miraculous late-career renaissance. There's a lot in it: rueful, grown-folks honesty, a helpless embrace of sensual pleasures. But mostly, there is irrepressibility, a simple inability to stop.

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Much in the same way he released his 11th and 12th albums in 2010, and his 13th and 14th albums in 2011, E-40's 15th, 16th, and 17th albums were all released on the same day. That may look prolific, but The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil 1, 2, or 3 -- or the three-CD set that boxes them all -- is proof that almost every E-40 mixtape you've seen is a bootleg and that in 2011, "getting paid" is at the top of the rapper's list. Otherwise, the Bay Area's slang king would actually acknowledge this epic undertaking somewhere toward the beginning of volume one, but the first Block Brochure kicks off with the good and small "Fast Lane," a standard-issue trunk rumbler that has "mixtape" written all over it.

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