Reminders of past greatness, unwanted guests and a lengthy runtime, the album lives up to its name.
Most funerals follow a similar schedule.
During the funeral, there are a few events that take place that fail to make it to the actual program. However, just as conventional as remembrance is, a seemingly never-ending service is equally synonymous to funerals.
Lil Wayne lives up to both positive and negative customs on Funeral.
At 24 songs with an hour and 16-minute runtime, Funeral is a daunting listening experience that could easily be cut down.
Imagine a funeral service that starts with touching insights from the person's mother, spouse, sibling, and best friend. Those closest to the deceased have done their loved one justice with their words, and you're content with the service and the amount of time you have left on your Saturday.
Then as you're applauding for what you felt was a great ending to a great service, a cousin who clearly didn't have the level of connection as the last few speakers comes to tell a story no one asked for. Then another distant cousin. And another distant cousin. And eight more distant cousins.
That's pretty much Funeral.
The project starts with everything you can ask for from a Wayne album.
There's Mannie Fresh production paired with top-tier breathless verses from Wayne on "Mahogany". Wayne is able to further solidify his label as a rap legend with a standout verse on "I Do It"-- a track with three different classes of rap. There's playful Wayne, as he successfully experiments on "Dreams". He even drops off a few playlist-worthy tracks like "Bing James", "Not Me" and "Wild Dogs".
"Trust Nobody" and "Clap For Em" felt like a collection basket for streams, but they were acceptable thanks to the quality tracks preceding and following them.
"Harden" should have served as the heartfelt singing of "Amazing Grace" that everyone went home touched remembering.
Instead, 11 cousins walked up to the altar and dragged down the funeral.
Excluding "Piano Trap", every song after "Harden" either sounds lazier than the first 13 or out of place on this project in general. After pouring his heart out over the soul sample on "Harden", Wayne follows it up with a drug song featuring an emailed verse from Takeoff.
As bad as that sounds, the tracklisting doesn't get any better after, as Wayne doesn't know if he wants to take the album down a dark path with tracks like "Bastard(Satan's Kid)" and "Get Outta My Head" or a soft path with songs like "Sights and Silincers" and "Never Mind".
In the end, he ends up giving us a scattered second half with the occasional gems of "Piano Trap", Murda Beat's production on "Line Em Up", and Lil Twist's verse on "Ball Hard".
Final Score: Four-hour funeral/10
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