'Woozy', the next song, goes wrong in all the exact same ways, wasting R. Luda finds unexpected ways to flex his wit on the track ('Let's get it poppin' like Orville Redenbacher'), but he can't do anything with a track this fiercely boring. Of course, it doesn't take long for everything to go to shit: 'End of the Night' is a wishy-washy saccharine sex-jam duet with Bobby Valentino, the sort of middling for-the-ladies fluff that threatens to derail damn near every high-profile commercial rap album of the last couple of years. But Luda's not as funny as he once was, sometimes even veering off into complete nonsense: 'Let me give you some swimming lessons on the penis/ Backstroke, breaststroke, stroke of a genius.' Still, it's encouraging to hear him trying to breathe fire again. On 'Ultimate Satisfaction', Luda gets some serious bounce back into his flow, riding the fuck out of Rich Skillz' streaky, damaged synths. 'Girls Gone Wild' is the sort of track the Neptunes don't often make these days, a great example of the farting spaceship-electro clatterfunk on which they built their name. For almost the first half of Therapy, he keeps his aim straight and ambitions low, wrapping that hyperactive rasp around a string of queasy synth burbles. Release Therapy is probably Luda's best album since Back for the First Time, but it's not like that's saying much. On his own albums, he mostly stopped doing what made him great a long time ago. He's maintained elite status mostly by saving up his best material for guest appearances on other people's songs.

But every one of Ludacris' four follow-up albums, including Release Therapy, abandon that seamless banger-parade setup for a dubious grab-bag of bangers, attempted bangers, ill-conceived life-is-deep 'serious' songs, bad jokes, and ooky sex-jams.

Ludacris latest album