Philly artist Ialive is probably thought of more as an emcee, but the truth is that he’s been producing dope beats for quite some time. Well, now that production is front and center as Ialive makes his first album where he’s doing all the beats and all of his friends are doing the vocals with I’ll Wait Forever.

For those that have been paying attention to Ialive’s production, you know that his bread and butter comes on some midtempo boom bap built off of a tasty psychedelic rock sample. That style is front and center on I’ll Wait Forever, but with seventeen tracks to work with, there is plenty of room for variation and experimentation along the way as well. There’s nothing too left field, but he does switch up rhythmic patterns and the way he’s chopping stuff up to create enough variation to keep your ears perked. The real key to an album like this, though, is the roster of guests. Not only does each guest need to have chemistry with the beat, but hopefully you can find some sort of consistency or through line with the guests so the listening experience doesn’t feel quite so random. Ialive has described this album as his version of Handsome Boy Modeling School, and as esteemed as Prince Paul and Dan the Automator, those two faced the same challenges across their albums together. On this particular album, we get spots from Painted Faces, Zilla Rocca, Torito, Goldzilla, Sleep Sinatra, Uncommon Nasa, Darko the Super, Dizzo, Cat Park, Height Keech, Mister, Day Tripper, Curly Castro, andrew., Ray Strife, Lt. Headtrip, Googie, Unsung, and Yikes the Zero. As it plays out, no one whiffs and comes up with a bad entry, but consistency and flow across the album does end up making the thing sound more like a compilation that you might skip around on than a fully formed album. This isn’t the worse problem to have, but in returns to the album, I’m more likely to jump into the tracks where some artists completely kill it, such as Height Keech & Mister or Curly Castro instead of wading through a bunch of tracks where the results are just okay.

What Ialive did here with I’ll Wait Forever is certainly commendable and ambitious, and it’s certainly not easy to pull off. His production is solid, but it takes a lot more to make an album like this work on a higher level than just a compilation of random tracks, and that’s where it doesn’t reach that top tier.