The UK rapper jumps back into life employing the help of Stormzy, JME, Wretch 32 and Giggs. This obviously an attempt to sound more ‘Grime-y’, does it work? Ehhhh. In parts of this record we get a flash of what Tinie can do but I feel that the whole concept of ‘Junk Food’ is horribly tacky, for instance the opening track is what I would honestly call one of the worst things I have heard this year. Now don’t get me wrong, I am a Tinie Tempah admirer when he hit the scene with Pass Out and followed it up with the great album Disc-Overy I was thinking that this boy would never fall off, then came the hits Frisky and Written in the Stars, whatever he touched turned to gold.
Then we feel the dark grime beats of Been the Man, the second track on this mixtape, the only highlight of this song is JME (one of my favourite artists) but the song just feels disjointed and that the producers had all these artists and had no idea where to put them, not to mention that Tinie did not fully utilise Stormzy an MC who is on fire at the moment and everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. Autogas then has one of the most annoying choruses on the planet “Man is on auto” echoes in my brain still as I am writing this (some might claim it’s catchy) the plus of this song is Mr Tempah himself, he definitely comes through with bars and steals the limelight to firmly place it on himself. Lyrically though Tinie is not on point throughout this whole project, this is not to take anything away from him though because I feel that isn’t the route he was going for with this project. We Don’t Play No Games is definitely a highlight of the whole project as the chorus is annoyingly addictive and you can almost feel BBK influences throughout the entire song, the song would certainly be something I would love to witness live.
Ultimately, this album has a ridiculous amount of features that Tinies verses are so far and few apart that at points you forget this is actually his project, not to mention that many of the features have you wishing for Tinie to put his ten cents in every second, they just add nothing to the project, on the most part taking away from it. The echoey drum is ever present and by the end of this album you will be praying it will stop, on the contrary this is a decent attempt by Tinie to shake off the ‘pop’ tag that has stuck to him like glue (The song with Jess Glynne did not help) you can’t help but feel that Tinie is expressing his creativity on this and I admire it but Tinie, stick to the pop-rap, the music is actually better.
3/10