After a seven-year hiatus, Lil Wayne has relaunched ‘Tha Carter’ series with a sixth entry that is occasionally inconsistent, but generally entertaining and well-crafted.

Stream: ‘Tha Carter VI’ – Lil Wayne

“This is Tha Carter, a lot more rich, and a whole lot smarter!”

With these words, uttered way back in 2004, Tha Carter series was formally launched, and 22-year-old Lil Wayne was poised to emerge from his role as entourage member of the Hot Boys and truly establish himself as a surefire solo artist. We’d all have “Wayne in ya brain” on the reg from this point on, rest assured.

Tha Carter series has continued to inspire fascination over the generation since then – its third and most ubiquitous entry, from 2008, remains the most recent rap album ever to sell 1 million copies in its first week out. But public interest in the project has somewhat waned (pun intended) in recent years, now that seven of them have past since the most recent entry and its now 42-year-old frontman is seemingly pushing his luck somewhat in the young man’s game that hip-hop has historically been.

Tha Carter VI - Lil Wayne — Tha Carter VI – Lil Wayne

Undaunted by the doubters, Weezy F. Baby is back with Tha Carter VI, ready to prove he’s still got the vocal and lyrical dexterity for which he has long been hailed. After sitting out vocally from the album’s intro, “King Carter,” Wayne enters the arena on “Welcome to the Carter” and asserts his enduring dominance in the rap game. “I still eat the rappers, I hear they appetizers,” he raps. “You throw Weezy on a beat, you throwin’ gas on fire.” That beat he’s thrown on, devised by his longtime sound engineer Ohnel, winds up being one of the most luxurious ones on the album. With a possibly AI-generated singer belting out an uplifting chorus – “Welcome to Tha Carter, where dreams never die”– Tha Carter VI gets off to a promising start in its opening minutes.

Some flab is all but inevitable over the course of the hour’s worth of music that follows. Online forums and critics don’t seem to have taken too kindly to “Peanuts 2 N Elephant” on the whole, for instance. And although Weezy singing Weezer on “Island Holiday” actually works a tad bit better than you might expect, the track doesn’t exactly represent a peak effort on Mr. Carter’s part.

But there are also plenty of quality material to scoop up. Lil Wayne is no stranger to rapping about sweets or to being paired alongside 2 Chainz, and the time-tested formulae prove successful yet again on “Cotton Candy,” one of the most enjoyable tracks on the record, with both 40-something rappers pretending to be 20 years younger and living the carefree club-going lifestyle (“On more white than Ovechkin, walked in the strip club, spent more Washingtons than a Redskin“). The jazzy saxophone loop is also a pleasant addition, and it’s nice to see Wayne devise a beat that pays distinct homage to the signature musical genre from his hometown of New Orleans.

Lil Wayne is known for being especially adventurous with his guest artist choices, and this time around, he ropes in another considerable lineup.

You might wonder what 65-year-old Bono of U2 is doing anywhere near a hip-hop record, before remembering that he actually did team up with Kendrick Lamar on a track some years ago, and thus manage to enjoy “The Days” for what it’s worth. Then comes “Maria,” which features one guest artist with substantial hip-hop experience (Wyclef Jean), another guest artist with practically none (tenor singer Andrea Bocelli), and a lead artist whose nimble and polysyllabic rhymes (“hold on to me rosary, I’m keeping it close me, working my sorcery”) ultimately manage to hold the experimental track together.

After testing these different creative waters, Lil Wayne enters more conventional mode for the album’s final few songs. Mannie Fresh, the DJ who helped craft the aforementioned first entry in the Tha Carter series, makes a glorious return on “Bein Myself,” which finds Wayne doing just that and rapping freely and energetically over one of Tha Carter VI‘s finest beats. He saves enough of the momentum for the album closer, “Written History,” which basically makes the same point as did 2005’s “Best Rapper Alive” from Tha Carter II, only with another 20 years’ worth of accomplishments to back his claim up.

In the end, Tha Carter VI winds up being largely a grab bag of memorable and less memorable material – not too surprisingly since, truth be told, a good number of Lil Wayne albums, both in and out of Tha Carter series, could be characterized as such.

But it’s still worth rummaging around said grab bag for the chance to uncover the moments in which Weezy does manage to demonstrate his enduring strengths as an MC.

The Roman numeral in the album’s title winds up roughly representing what it merits out of 10.

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