The Mello Music Group Instrumental Series begins with an offering by SoCal producer J. Bizness. Bizness had been on his grind for a few years, most notably producing tracks for Little Brother and Canibus. His debut for MMG is a concept album built around the idea of air travel.

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot to praise with this release. On the most basic level, his beats just aren’t that interesting or well-developed enough to maintain interest over twenty four tracks. Everything is down tempo, but he never creates any interesting moods, melodies, countermelodies, layers, or instrumentation. In short, the music is very flat and dull. Your ears never perk up over the course of the album, and you don’t get lost in it, either. On top of that, there are several points on the album in which the drums sound really clumsy and off beat, which then holds back the album from achieving any sort of groove that you could then get into. On top of all this, the concept of flight that Bizness is clinging to is extremely weak. He crutches on it, with comedic samples of people like George Carlin and Monty Python, but they are played too long and often. He also includes stories of flight from other artists, but these stories don’t prove to be very interesting, with the lone exception of Oddisee’s story of being stopped by custom officials. There’s just not a whole lot to grab onto here.

Normally, Mello Music Group does quite well with instrumental releases, with Oddisee and Apollo Brown both recently releasing some excellent albums. However, it’s a big swing and a miss with J. Bizzness. I don’t know what happened here, but it didn’t work.