The Black Eyed Peas - Elephunk

‘Elephunk’ is a hip-pop party album with obvious commercial ambitions, which it tries to realize (even more so than previous BEP albums) by subjugating content to form. BEP leader/producer/auteur Wil.i.am casts his net wide, mixing live instrumentation with old school hip-hop beats in the service of a musical sensibility derived from George Clinton, A Tribe Called Quest and Digital Underground. BEP knows how to have their fun—the results are uniformly sleek, efficient, and purposeful, even when burdened with the obligatory and extraneous guesting here and there (courtesy of Justin Timberlike, Papa Roach, and Sergio Mendes). If it falls short of its implicit goal of crossing over, if it’s limited in depth and moderate in its ideas and passions to a fault, it’s worth pointing out that the songs are catchy (“The Boogie that Be”) more than they’re not (“Latin Girls”).

Matt Parks (July 29, 2003)