Album Review: The Block Brochure: Welcome to the Soil, Pt. 2 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. The second volume, like the first, seems to start mid-mixtape as the off-kilter "I'm Laced" ignores the massiveness of the project.

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