Tha Carter III (Universal Motown/Cash Money)

There’s a whiff of anticlimax to Tha Carter III, the first album Lil Wayne’s released since becoming—after a staggering run of masterfully unhinged mix tapes and scene-stealing guest spots—the consensus best rapper alive. First a teenage phenom, then a hyperliterate anomaly in the rowdy Dirty South scene, Wayne’s now campaigning for superstardom. Tha Carter III is his platform.

His lines packed with wacky non sequiturs and his voice a gasping, howling wheeze, the 25-year-old Louisianan is probably the most eccentric figure to emerge in mainstream hip-hop since Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Where he used to rein in his weed-addled weirdness, Wayne now exploits it, spraying hallucinatory lines that are not so much clever as fascinatingly daft—the verbal equivalent of a Merrie Melodies cartoon, as seen on acid.

Tha Carter III, then, is both his most idiosyncratic release to date and his most radio-friendly, thanks to a handful of sure-to-be-summer-hits featuring production and guest vocals from Kanye West, Babyface, and T-Pain. Elsewhere, though, the New Orleans native takes his licence to lunacy just a little too far, making for a series of album tracks that spill out messily into the margins, betraying the focus and economy that mark other rappers’ mid-career masterpieces, like Jay-Z’s The Blueprint (2001). In retrospect, Wayne’s best work probably came on 2005’s Tha Carter II, when the only person calling him the best rapper alive was Wayne himself. The rap industry’s never needed another classic album as badly as it does right now, but for all the hype and promise surrounding it, Tha Carter III comes up short.