West Coast rap gets reduced to a narrow set of sounds more often than it deserves, and Blu has spent a career sitting exactly where the G-Funk lineage meets the LA underground. LA is a distillation of that: homage to the classic sonics with a layered read on the city underneath it. Oakland producer Sndtrak, of 9th Wonder's Soul Council, handles the beats, reworking vintage grooves into something that carries Blu's writing rather than competing with it. Volume 10, Thurz, MED, Iman Omari, Trizz and ICECOLDBISHOP all appear.