Cut Chemist is one of the greatest living deejays, and one of the founding members of Jurassic 5. His lone solo album, The Audience’s Listening, in 2006. It was very well received and resulted in a couple of classic singles and videos. However, while he’s still toured and deejayed since that time, fans have been waiting all this time for a proper follow up. Twelve years later, the wait is finally over as Cut Chemist delivers Die Cut.

I know that there is a myriad of reasons that it took Cut Chemist so long to give us a second solo album, but once you reach a certain number of years, audience expectations begin to shift. It’s not completely fair, but it’s hard as a fan to shift out of the mentality of, “After making us wait for twelve years, this better be amazing!” And that’s the struggle with Die Cut in a nutshell. There are plenty of reasons to like this album. It’s perfectly enjoyable. If this came out in 2008, we’d all just acknowledge that is was fun, maybe not as good as the first, and then move on. When you wait twelve years, it becomes just a little harder to swallow an album that’s just fine. Part of the problem is that there is a substantial part of the album that feels like it’s going back to the well to try the same stuff from The Audience’s Listening, except it’s not quite as good. You get that layered drum effect that’s heavy on the swing rhythms and floor toms, you get some good scratching, you get some psychedelic samples, and you get repeat visits from Mr. Lif, Edan, and Hymnal, all who helped with some of the breakout singles from the first album. And it’s all fine here, but none of it is quite as good as it was in the past, so Cut Chemist finds himself in a conundrum. Had he tried something more experimental and different, it might not have worked, but at least we’d be talking about how he tried. In coming back with album that’s trying to recapture the magic of an album that came out so long ago, you can’t help but compare it with the last album, and in comparison, nothing on Die Cut quite stands up. “Plane Jane,” with Hymnal, just doesn’t have a compelling hook to it the way that “What’s the Altitude” does. There’s plenty of good scratching, but nothing on the creative level of “Spat.” I’m not mad at this album, but I can’t imagine a situation in which I’d be deejaying and I’d reach for Die Cut instead of The Audience’s Listening, which always kills.

Cut Chemist is one of the most renowned and respected deejays in the world, and his first solo album was an instant classic. Twelve years after dropping that album, we got the highly anticipated follow up, and now that it’s here, it just feels like a big shoulder shrug of an album. Hopefully we won’t have to wait another twelve years for an album that’s just okay.