Faith of a Mustard Seed is Mustard's well-laboured, unifying party

It sure wasn’t hurt by Kendrick Lamar immediately repeating it before scorching the hip hop universe for the rest of calculable time; turns out, having your name doubly start such a song was good press.

As Mustard states in the meditative, bulky closer, this newest record was already well on its way by the time “Not Like Us” was conceived. This is a welcome suggestion given the multitude of ways this album could have been thrown together to capitalize on a resurgence in popularity. Faith of a Mustard Seed, while more front-loaded than the weight inside a forklift, is a well-laboured, unifying party.

While it is more representative of the type of party that starts strong and promises the intensity of Project X before petering out by 9pm as everyone goes home early, Mustard pines for more introspection than that format would allow. Not really, though. There is plenty of space inside a rave for a heart to heart, as Charli XCX patently proved this year, but ripping the wheels off the bus in favor of one-to-one mid-paced time in the latter half was just Mustard’s intention.

While the second half of the record walks in place until the closer buffs out some ambition, it is by no means a hard listen; it may run up to the edge of boring, but boring in a nostalgic way, like a lazy afternoon at your grandmother’s house. Sure, you could fill your time listing better ways you could have spent it, but there’s an assurance in pleasant familiarities this record embraces. It’s a party, but one you’ve been at eternally.

The roster of features may run as a standard gamut of rising talents and established trap stars, but there is a general attention to fitting each track to the form of each rapper. Travis Scott especially shines on the standout middle-piece “Parking Lot,” the closest the record comes to a true hit. It is inevitable that such a project would live and die beneath the shadow of “Not Like Us,” which is a criticism answered by an indifferent shrug by Mustard and Co. Their world is too weary to also worry about that. The lasting aftertaste of the record, however, suggests the stakes should’ve changed at some point.

It’s a predicament to be in where this perfectly listenable and often fun record set an impossible bar to clear from before it was even released. You go to a restaurant and have the best meal of your life, recapturing the magic of previous meals this place had served, and all the other items on the menu are tragically decent. On any other day, in any other context, I would enjoy myself more, but Mustard and Lamar have made a track so good, I’d rather just play it 16 times than listen to the album in full again. Talent doesn't need to make sense.