In retrospect, this might’ve made for a great curtain call for the Neptunes’ imperial phase. Clones is a wall-to-wall house party featuring nearly every major hip-hop and R&B star they’d notched a Top Ten hit with, delivered right at the brink of an overexposure that the following year’s scaled-back presence helpfully mitigated. Maybe that’s why so much of this album feels like it’s on the brink of hubris-fueled disaster, only to be rescued by its almost completely irony-free dedication to a good time. Are Busta Rhymes’ ass-driven hyperfixations (“Light Your Ass on Fire”), Ludacris’s invincible, bellowing shit-talk against the remotest possibility of falling off (“It Wasn’t Us”), and Nelly swearing up and down that he can be a paradoxically faithful player (“If”) the most W’s-first-term clubland agenda thinkable? Yeah, but they’re also respectively more maniacally futurist, dissonantly weirder, and populuxe sleeker than that grotesque era really deserved. And even if their “hey, we heard Rock Is Back” deep cuts (featuring In Search Of….-bolstering power-poppers Spymob and adenoidal demi-Weezeroids High Speed Scene) seem like a bewildering detour, at least they were ahead of the curve (and better at it) when it came to the Travis Barker-fueled punk-hop cultural tide that’d eventually dump Machine Gun Kelly on our heads. Oh, and not to bury the lede, but this is the one with “Frontin’” on it — the track where Pharrell finally just steps out and reveals he wants to be Prince. That he wound up just being Pharrell instead is still a good consolation prize.