Album Review: Ty Dolla $ign – Beach House 3 (Deluxe)
2 min read
With a duration just shy of fifty-two minutes, the sophomore LP, Beach House 3, from Tyrone Griffin Jr – better known as Ty Dolla $ign – may seem positively minuscule compared to the seventy-two-and-a-half minutes of his début, Free TC. Perhaps in an effort to beef up the album and bolster sales – or the increasingly important streams – Griffin’s has released a deluxe edition of Beach House 3, adding six “bonus” songs, and nearly twenty minutes, to the seven-month-old record.
In its original incarnation, Beach House 3 concluded its materialistic and hedonistic romp with Nate Howard Intro. Written by public speaker, poet, and educator Nate Howard, and featuring the lines “my eulogy was read by a stranger/full of love but with misplaced anger” and “the life you lead is the legacy you leave”, Nate Howard Intro created the sense that the preceding nineteen tracks formed a cautionary tale – albeit a confused one – of the dangers of attaining money and success, particularly for their own sake. But by adding the new tracks, which include new single Pineapple, at the end of the record, Griffin has further diluted the impact of his exploration of fame’s downsides.
As with the original twenty tracks, the additional songs feature a slew of guest artists – Wiz Khalifa, Gucci Mane, Quavo, 21 Savage, French Montana, and Yo Gotti – and as with the standard version of the album these guest appearances add little to the overall value of the tracks, with most contributions feeling like afterthoughts or non-descript parts filled by whoever happened to be available to show up at the studio on a particular day. Even in its original release, Beach House 3 was an album for the Ty Dolla $igh faithful, and the deluxe version is only for the most devout.
