For those fortunate enough to be anointed the "next big thing," it can sometimes be a tough road—for every Nas, there's an AZ, for every Jay-Z there's a Memphis Bleek and for every Maino, there's a Saigon. Much of the time, it has little do with skill—peep the latter case—and more to do with marketing, shifting audience tastes, and sheer luck. While time will tell if Asher Roth will be the next Eminem or not, he's certainly being touted as it—his first album is an enjoyable enough, albeit uneven, romp through the mind of a suburban slacker.

A white kid from the suburbs who can actually spit—not Limp Bizkit spit but hang with Busta Rhymes spit—Asher has been steadily blowing up over the past year off the strength off his frat boy anthem "I Love College" and a DJ Drama-hosted mixtape. He unsurprisingly knocks the ball out of the park on a few of Asleep In The Bread Aisle’s tracks. "Lark On My Go-Kart" kicks off the album in scattershot, amusing fashion, "La Di Da" offers a little substance beyond smoking weed and juvenile sex talk, and "Fallin'" finds Asher recounting his relationship with rap over the piano-driven, poppy production. The one song everyone will be talking about, though, is "As I Em," where Asher deals with the inevitable skin color and voice inflection comparisons with Eminem, brushing them aside with a semi-convincing "If I don't confront the problem it will never go away / Unless it is addressed there's nothing left for me to do / It's impossible rejecting an elephant in the room."

While Asher does excel on a few of the album’s tracks, deftly navigating the guitar-driven beats, at a mere 12 tracks the album has too many hiccups to earn it the accolades Asher so clearly wanted. "She Don't Wanna Man" is post-Fergie Black Eyed Peas drivel, "Sour Patch Kids" is an eye-rollingly naïve take on the state of the world over one of the more tepid beats on the album, and "Bad Day" is a lyrical and musical disaster. A little more quality control would have excised these tracks from the album. Though the sheer paucity of songs on the album leaves one wondering if there would have been much else to replace them with.

In the end, Asher delivers a middling, unbalanced debut album, but one that has enough snippets of talent to leave his fans confident that he'll eventually deliver on the abundant promise he showed on a few of his mixtape tracks. He's certainly not the next Eminem. He needs to significantly expand both his musical and lyrical vocabulary first, but he's definitely not the next great flop either. And that’s enough—for now.

—Matthew Mundy
04.21.09