You might know Dallas artist Harry Krum by just the name Krum, or maybe the alias he used years ago, Playdough. While he’s probably best known as an emcee, he’s been producing this whole time as well, often under the name Harry Krum. The one thing Krum hasn’t done over the course of his career is to deliver an album strictly as a producer with others rhyming over his beats. That is until now, because that’s exactly what he’s done with Black Lung.

Over the course of the history of hip hop, one of the hardest types of albums to pull off successfully has been the one-producer/roster-full-of-guest-emcees albums. Few of them are flat out bad, but most of them can be described as “up-and-down” or “uneven.” It’s just tough to bring a lot of guests together and get everyone on the same page and keep the level of effort up when you’re bringing in ten-plus artists to rhyme over your beats. For Black Lung, Harry Krum tries to give the album a theme, often incorporating audio clips about miners and black lung disease, but it never quite goes anywhere and the emcees don’t really pick up on this and expand on it when they start to rhyme to make the theme stick in a meaningful way. Krum’s beats are really solid, though, with lots of gritty and funky boom bap for days, and he does an excellent job of composing and sequencing the album so that each track really flows into the next, like you’ve got an expert deejay on stage who’s not allowing any dead time as emcees come and go from the mic. As for the emcees, everyone pretty much just falls into the classic “talking my shit” category, which isn’t the worst thing in the world, but it does leave things open ended. Some artists manage to stand out with a combination of creativity and charisma, such as Sivion, Ozay Moore, Sareem Poems, Tanya Morgan, and Stik Figa, but just as many get lost in the mix with rhymes that maybe feel a little cliché or uninspired. It’s just a tall order to get as many emcees as Krum got over the course of seventeen tracks to all come together successfully.

Black Lung certainly has its moments, but it also suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen. Harry Krum isn’t the first or last producer to have this problem when putting together an emcee compilation album like this, but it does lead to something of a hunt-and-peck situation when you go back to the album for multiple listens.