It must be nice to be Lazerbeak. It must be nice to have a friend (in this case, DJ Plain Ole Bill) go through some unreleased beats that you’ve been working on and to emerge with an album in tact. Seriously, I’m in awe of just how talented and prolific this guy is. On the heels of working on last Decemeber’s incredible No Kings with the rest of Doomtree, he comes right back with his first instrumental album in Lava Bangers.

While Lazerbeak released a solo album in 2010, Legend Recognize Legend was more of an indie rock record than hip hop. Which is not to say anything bad about the record, just that for those that weren’t familiar with his work with The Plastic Constellations, it probably caught some fans off guard. Well, for those of you that thought that a Lazerbeak solo album meant a collection of instrumental hip hop beats that are varied and incredibly interesting, Lava Bangers is your album. With twenty tracks to the album, most of the songs come in at two minutes or under, which means that nothing goes on to long, and we get a ton of different styles packed into the LP. Plain Ole Bill did a great job in helping sequence, blend, and scratch so that the record flows seemlessly. What makes Lava Bangers especially interesting is that it feels like we’re getting a glimpse into Lazerbeak’s creative process. While the album works really well as it is, I can also imagine some tracks getting fleshed out in collaboration with other emcees. Actually, I’m not the only one who thought of this, as Plain Ole Bill and Lazerbeak are in the middle of an online contest to pick out the best submissions of emcees rhyming over Lava Banger tracks. We also get to see that just like any other top tier producer, Lazerbeak is able to draw from a wide range of styles and sources and mix them together into something coherently his own. There are only a few moments where the album veers off in a direction that I don’t care for, namely with the second track, “Walk It Out.” It travels just a little too close into easy-listening-hotel-information-channel territory for my comfort zone. That said, that song transitions into one of the strongest tracks on the album, “Smash Hit,” which manages to funnel European synths with Latin and Indian drums through a hip hop filter and come out absolutely banging. Everyone will naturally gravitate toward a particular section of the record that is most in line with their personal taste, but what makes Lava Bangers special is how well it functions as a whole.

If Lava Bangers is what happens when Lazerbeak isn’t planning on making an instrumental record, I can only imagine what we can expect from a planned project. In case you didn’t already know, Lazerbeak is one of the most talented hip hop producers working right now. Lava Bangers is just the most recent reinforcement of that statement.