Pardon my lateness, but this album deserves a post. Coming from XO, one third of the esteemed Diamond District, this is something you will want to feast your ears on. Featuring some fantastic production from AB, Oddisee, and Soulful, you already know you have a handful of guaranteed bangers ahead of you. I am really starting to feel spoiled over here with all this wonderful free music coming out of the DMV. Definitely the home of one of the more exciting movements in hip-hop. Give this album a spin and share some thoughts…
Download: XO – ONE.ONE.TEN
Hit the skip for the full artwork & track listing… 
01 – Intro (One. One. Ten) (Prod By Oddisee)
02 – Fast Life (Prod By Oddisee)
03 – Lime Light (Feat. Alison Carney) (Prod By AB The Producer)
04 – Take Home (Feat. Raheem Devaughn) (Prod By AB The Producer)
05 – U Not Like Me (Prod By AB The Producer)
06 – Black Broadway (Prod By Oddisee)
07 – We R The Ones (Feat. Tabi Bonney) (Prod By Oddisee)
08 – She Pose Too (Prod By Soulful)
09 – Crucial (Feat. Gordo Brega) (Prod By AB The Producer)
10 – I Want In (Feat. Ishan Bilal) (Prod By AB The Producer)
11 – Blah Blah (Prod By Oddisee)
12 – City Loves Me Back (Feat. Alison Carney) (Prod By AB The Producer)
13 – Do It (Prod By AB The Producer)
14 – City sh*t (Feat. Toney Night) (Prod By AB The Producer)
15 – How Does It Feel (Prod By AB The Producer)
Honestly, I’m a little underwhelmed by this release. When the first two tracks were leaked — “Do It” and “Take Home” — I thought the album would be exciting. Both were MUCH more pop than his last four mixtapes — all classics — but both still worked pretty well. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the rest of his album, considering I liked 8 of 12 tracks on “Monumental” right before this, yet he made music videos for 2 of the 4 tracks I wasn’t into, since both were too much pop/had no edge. So I figured here, since I *LIKED* the pop hits, I might dig the rest of the album, whether he did it like “Monumental” and made the rest of the tracks a little more experimentally or whether he’d simply managed to switch styles seamlessly on yet ANOTHER mixtape and produced a bunch of pop-style songs I could really enjoy.
After having listened to all the songs several times through, the only song that lives up to the classics of the last few albums is “She Pose To” — which is especially disappointing for an album blessed with no less than FIVE Oddisee beats, all of which are shockingly dull. After that, the two pre-releases mentioned above are probably the best offerings. Almost all the other songs are worth a *listen*, but none is even near top-level material. The production is flat across the board, and the hooks are cheesy and terrible. X.O.’s verses still have PLENTY of solid moments, but his normal charm with cliche rap themes delivered with a novel style goes sour way too often. And, just as with “Us vs. Them,” essentially every guest verse is amateurish and detracts from the song.
Maybe I sound too harsh. It’s a pretty alright album. I would NEVER want to introduce someone to X.O.’s greatness with it, though. And when you have talent like X.O., Oddisee and AB on 15 tracks, I think it’s fair to have pretty high expectations. And 13 tracks didn’t come close to meeting them.
As I said, the highlight of the album is definitely the one track produced by someone besides Oddisee or AB — Soulful. I’m actually kind of curious about him. The only other song I own listed as produced by him is his remix off the DMV “Reasonable Doubt Tribute” mixtape of “Ain’t No,” which is also an awesome song, and the re-chopping of the original sample is A+. I’d like to know more about him, and hope I see him on more material somewhere on the hip-hop landscape in the future.