Welcome back to Ranting About Music’s unofficial Wheezy Week.

No, this guy.

Yep, more Lil Wayne. With his highly anticipated 9th solo album Tha Carter IV delayed (again), Wayne dropped this mixtape for free as his way of saying…well, it’s there in the title. Albums get delayed all the time, but such a prolific rapper making a mixtape apologizing about his album delay feels unsettling. And by substituting the mixtape with the album, you’re also implicitly putting more hype on both.

And hype is the last thing that Sorry 4 The Wait needs. Kicking off with “Tunechi’s Back” (a play on “Tupac’s Back”), the mixtape is off to a shakey start; Wheezy’s flow never really clicks, and his voice on the track is a wreck, too. His lines aren’t bad, but nothing we haven’t heard before; Wheezy’s going after haters, gets women, etc. At this point it’s bordering self-parody; there’s no way in 2011 that a line like “Fuck bitches, get money, mission complete” is going to sound anything other than cartoony.

Sorry 4 The Wait is freestyle heavy with eight out of twelve songs consisting of what Lil Wayne (and fellow Young Money members Gudda Gudda and Lil B) can spew out on top of other rapper’s beats. This can occasionally be entertaining; YouTube hit “Gucci Gucci” already had Lil Wayne’s manic, bizarre energy to it, and his bedroom brag on “Marvin’s Room” is a nice reversal on the original. The main problem with all the freestyling is that Lil Wayne never deviates from the same few ideas. Lil Wayne’s rich. Lil Wayne likes Patron. Lil Wayne likes pussy, perhaps more than Patron. Lil Wayne’s got guns. Lil Wayne’s sorry about the motherfucking wait. We get it.

There’s a bit of a momentum push towards the end of the mixtape. On “Hands Up (My Last)”, Wayne’s flow has a melodic feel to it that is tied to the initial song’s rhythm. It’s a step up from tracks like “Rollin'”, where he rattles off over ho-hum productions. But the highlight has to be the title track, built on Adele’s “Rolling In The Deep”. It could easily be a novelty track (“Listen to Lil Wayne rap over Adele!”), but Wheezy spits with a rapid flow and sounds like he’s having an infectious great time. It’s a spot of fun that Sorry 4 The Wait is sorely missing.

The low point is probably”Inkredible Remix”, which features a slew of up and coming rappers fighting to be heard over a truly obnoxious track overloaded with too many synths. The track is only five minutes long, but it’s a total mess that feels at least twice as long. On a similar note of “Just…why?” is Sorry 4 The Wait‘s outro, which is less of an outro and more five minutes of credits set to “Run the World (Girls)”. The track, consisting mostly of shoutouts and Lil Wayne’s multi-tracked rambling, is a test of patience on a mixtape that lost its free pass long ago.

Maybe I’d be more forgiving if Sorry 4 The Wait was just something Lil Wayne put out for the sake of releasing new material. But as a holdover until Tha Carter IV, it’s completely disappointing. With so many freestyles, the mixtape feels rushed, and these uninspired, repetitive raps (just count how many times the phrase “Sorry for the wait” comes up, I dare you) do nothing to change that. Three and four tracks are worth revisiting, but the rest are download and delete fodder. Here’s hoping Tha Carter IV makes up for it, one and a half stars out of five.

tl;dr: It would have been better if Wheezy hadn’t even acknowledged the wait, 1.5/5.