Summertime '06

"Summertime '06 crams 20 songs inside an hour and when it ends Vince Staples is somehow still mid-sentence. The heavy-lidded, preternaturally calm Long Beach rapper has always seemed to have a remarkable amount on his mind, with more to say than he has room for: The last line on "Taxi", the final track of his first full mixtape, 2011's Shyne Coldchain Vol. 1, ended in a similar fashion, with a freezing bucket of water-"Tried praying for forgiveness, but God told me to shut up"-before the music simply stopped...
Like Chance the Rapper drained of hope, Staples expresses complex ideas in plain, hard sentences, ones that can be handed to you like a pamphlet: "No matter what we grow into, we never gon' escape our past," he states simply on "Like It Is". His rapping is conversational, but these are the conversations you have when all optimism has been burned away."

- Pitchfork