3 out of 5

Label: Weightless Recordings

Produced by: Blueprint

First things first: These are mostly amazing songs.  Blueprint’s production, generally, is simple but rich: effective beats that are slickly stitched together from bits and pieces you’ll never discern, often resulting in something that either immediately gets your head bobbing or rather slowly and surely gets its hooks in ya’.  Respect the Architect, as the 30 minute boast it is, strips this back to essentials: you still get tracks like the title track that are constructed as mentioned above, but a lot of these tracks just set something spinning so ‘Print can make his point.  And he does.  The subject matter doesn’t stray too far from the album’s thesis statement, but that don’t matter much: we’re dealing with a seasoned wordsmith who knows how to play it cool and still impress.

So what’s up with the three stars?  Well, within that short paragraph of praise are the hints: this is a very short album.  It sneaks up with an intro track before the arresting hook of Oh Word?… which just ends abruptly after a couple of minutes.  Frankly, ‘Print doesn’t always have the strongest conclusions to his tracks, but it’s a very notable bummer at the beginning of the album, especially given how good the song is otherwise.  This pattern continues.  Stacked up against the relative sparseness of some tracks (Overdosin’, for example, doesn’t even have a proper lead-in – it’s really just its beat) and the very limited topics covered, ‘Respect’ starts to feel like snippets instead of songs.  Which is too bad, given, again, how good the core of these songs are, as well as some new classics that are indeed mixed in, like the moving and intelligent thoughts of Perspective.

‘Respect the Architect’ is absolutely a needed addition to your Blueprint library, and playing any select track will easily have you doing as the album title commands.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t stack up too well as an album, its construction and brevity severely limiting its impact.