"can we revisit Saigon's "GSNT" and discuss how incredible it is?"
For whatever reason I hadn't gotten around to listening to this album until early last week (which is strange considering how big of a JB fan I am) and since then I haven't listened to anything else.
This album is very high caliber. Beats, Lyrics, Subject Matter, Concepts... it's all there.
The thing that stood out to me right away was the way the tracks were all sequences together. It's not as if the songs were sporadically placed on the album, there was actually thought and effort put into the beats and concepts, allowing for a seamless song-to-song transition. Let's be honest, how many albums can you think of where the tracks blend seamlessly together like that??
Now, onto the production. Well, what more needs to be said, an album that consists of 90% just blaze beats... yeah.
Lyrics/Content: This was probably the most interesting thing... Saigon was able to pull off a substance-heavy album without being pretentious or overly cliché. In fact, he does it in a refreshingly conceptual way. And he's able to hold my attention throughout the entire album.
Lastly, this album appears to have everything that a "real" hiphop fan would want from a pseudo-mainstream release. Not even the singles pander to "mainstream" standards. Why did this album fall under the radar like it did?