Time passes, and what you thought you knew may have been incorrect from the get-go. Ab-Soul is one to knock out of the park more consistently when the nature of the tracks wanes on personable instead of flaunting and flexing, though there have been hits within that realm, like “Hunnid Stax.” We hear the essence of it on the gripping and smooth “Hollandaise.” It’s a blissful melancholy that gets highlighted over beautifully resonant and sometimes minimalist (comparatively) production, continuously boasting the thematic prowess of Soul. It’s in the emotionally complex “Herbert” and “The Wild Side,” which shows us who he has been throughout the years – someone constantly on the side of the road where there’s an obstacle with every step. We hear it in the twinkly “Fallacy,” which details Ab-Soul’s hiccups and moments where he succeeds. That’s still prevalent here, along with more reflections that sees Ab-Soul constructing his multi-layered persona with vitriol. It may have been why he never got an Interscope Records co-sign, allowing him to get down to the nitty-gritty and deliver songs where his sleeves ache, and his grief is on full display like he did with “Closure” off Stigmata. It isn’t devoid of lyrical grit, where he can shift the parameters of his flows, keeping you engaged as Soul never diverts into songs that wane too much into darker experimentations.Īs a lyricist, Ab-Soul’s content is kitschy compared to most populous rap in the above or underground scene. It’s an evident relic of the past with its jazzy, at times lightly funkadelic tones that give us similar tendencies akin to the audacious and beautiful “Illuminate” from 2012’s Control System. But that isn’t the case with Herbert, an album that feels more like the dark undercurrents beneath the percussion getting refined and letting it control are more linear approach instead of flip-flopping between the overly experimental and the “Ab-Soul, Asshole” that we’ve listened to since Longterm Mentality. 2014’s Stigmata felt like a linear direction of drug-infused beats built with the complexities of perfectly quaffed glass, and Do What Thou Wilt felt more of the same, just lesser in sonic appeal and construction. It seems that he has remembered: the most poignant discovery is that of one's own character.Mentally exhausting but exuberantly rewarding, Ab-Soul’s new album Herbert takes us through hurdles as Soul reflects on life and emotional imbalances that have placed him into a zone where the focus was his mental health. He mourns Mac Miller and ponders drug dependency, wrestles with survivor's guilt and challenges his own inactivity. Soul leans into his usual imagery - the crown of thorns, puzzles and chakras, stardust and galaxies - but here he draws upon it to think about self-improvement. The beat is built around a swirling sample of Nick Hakim's "Green Twins," which seems to echo in the background as drums click into place before him. Trying to do better is a common theme in his songs, working through the big questions to get at more personal answers, but here he puts the onus on himself explicitly. His new song, "Do Better," resurfaces the Ab-Soul at the root of even his most outlandish music - the curious, trenchant around-the-way philosopher. On his last album, Do What Thou Wilt., from 2016, he got so tangled in the threads of string theory that he lost the plot entirely. He not only lost his sense of reason chasing conspiracy theories, but also the grounded outlook that made his wordplay so bracing. But soon his chosen rap position as the stoned overthinker started to spiral out of control. As one of TDE's original four, he helped build the label's rep as a rap powerhouse with epigrammatic lyricism that attempted the heady work of unraveling the mysteries of the universe.
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