Bento Box Review

Since Miss Furtado’s Promiscuous and JT’s My Love was released, we’ve all been waiting for Timbaland to drop is latest album, Shock Value. In the last twelve months, there is no doubt that Timbaland has been the number one producer on the scene. His beats can be heard on radio stations around the world, it’s hard to even listen to the radio and not hear one of his elite mixes.

Timbaland’s beats have always been amongst the top producers, such as The Neptunes, Dr. Dre, and Rick Rubin, but Shock Value is a piece of musical artistry. His first single, Give it To me, has already been a hit, but for some reason, it seems as if the vocals were only added because of necessity. Way I Are, which is set to be the next single, however, is sick. If you haven’t already heard this track, it is phenomenal. Ranking up there with some of his other greatest hits such as, Jay-Z’s Dirt Off Your Shoulder and Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On.

Timbaland has also shown a liking to Thomas Crown in his work on previous songs, this becomes pretty evident in the single Oh Timbaland, which features the tunes from Nina Simone’s Sinnerman. Lyrics slightly altered as to say, “Oh Timbaland where you gonna run to?”. A cool track for all the Simone fans out there.

With that said, the tracks feel somewhat disjointed in that there are many featured artists and several genres here and that doesn’t always equal a solid album. Some might say that Timbaland is just loading up the tracks in hopes that there are some hits in there. There are 18 tracks on this album with one hidden track, basically a double album. Some featured artists are: The Hives, Fall Out boy, 50 Cent, Tony Yayo and Justin Timberlake to name a few.

A solid album, but at times feels like Timbaland was trying to hard. I am going to give it a 7.5/10.