The cardboard sleeve features a designer-style pattern featuring a childвЂ™s silhouette in a portrait frame, an MPC, and the initials JD. Dilla looms over the city on the jewel case cover, his clothes fresh, his face unreadable and flocks of doves flying behind him. But with The Shining, only about 75% complete at the time of DillaвЂ™s death, this legend-building is given physical form. One could argue that it began months back, with the endless streams of mourners typing their grief onto message boards immediately following YanceyвЂ™s passing, with the memorial concerts and the tributes and the news articles. With The Shining, J DillaвЂ™s first true posthumous release, the enshrining of J Dilla the artist has begun. The title works similarly - why Donuts, the question went? As the official line answered, because James Yancey, the man behind the boards, liked them. J Dilla smiles on the cover of Donuts, his face tilted down and blurred in a distinct demarcation between the artist and the man - a reminder that however well any one of us may think we grow to know a soul through its musical output, the main bulk of that soulвЂ™s humanity will escape us.

It was the masterвЂ™s tour de force, his last creative burst: imagine what he could have accomplished with just a little bit more time. Most of the largely instrumental albumвЂ™s vocals were mere fragments, slices of breath and exhalation and noise ripped senselessly, divorced entirely from their respective contexts, shuddering like ghosts through the sounds of the tracks. The beats changed almost as quickly as they established themselves, varying almost impossibly in style and tone, a sequence of grooves and variations and samples chopped in points almost beyond belief.

J DillaвЂ™s last release, the almost-posthumous Donuts on Stones Throw, was an explosion of creative talent, an outpouring of ideas packed as many as could fit onto a 45-minute disc.

J dilla donuts review