Baker's Dozen II: The Oven Stays Hot

First, the house rules. Every album reviewed in this magazine gets judged the same five ways: beat selection, bars, flow, concept, and sound quality. Each record earns a score from one to five plugs — five means the coast should be studying it, one means pull it out of the wall. Same rubric, every review, no exceptions. Learn it once and you can argue with us forever.

Baker's Dozen II: 🔌🔌🔌🔌 — four plugs.

hero 9:16 | Live in the 805

Start where the record is strongest. The sound quality is amazing: Bake has mastered layering, using his own voice as another instrument, stacking parts of a song until they turn dynamic and in-your-face. The mixes are great, the master is clean and loud, and under the engineering is a writer who knows how to construct a hit — very catchy hooks, memorable moments in every verse.

Beat selection runs nearly as hot. Standouts like "Dumb," "Aye Bruther," "3AM on PCH," and "Dance" show the range — production that nods to the greats, E-A-Ski to The Neptunes, always with his own twist.

The bars are impeccable, and the pop-culture flips do real work: "If baby girl fire, let me bend it like Zuko." Elsewhere he's reaching for Mace Windu. Whatever the reference, he always finds a clever way to get his point across — writing you rewind to catch the second layer.

Flow is where a plug gets left on the table. It isn't the same flow on every song — more like one family of flows, and he does a decent job making sure each track sounds a little different from the last. Still, a little more variety would take these songs somewhere new. Good, not yet great.

And concept? This isn't a conceptual album, and it doesn't pretend to be — which takes nothing away from the project. If anything, there are a few more songs here than it needs. It's still worth the listen front to back: a really fun, genuinely good record.

Four plugs, then: 🔌🔌🔌🔌. The oven stays hot — "Gettin' 2 It" sits at №1 on the 805 chart the same week the sequel lands. The receipts live at connxct.club/charts.