![]() He’s a capable, sometimes personable MC, but he’s not an especially compelling one. The problem is that Wale and his team made a really decent soul rap album without a rapper soulful enough to carry it. The music on The Gifted sounds fantastic, with intricately arranged keys and strings, stacks of soul and gospel-inspired backup vocals, and deep, rubbery bass lines. (Chicago rapper Tree recently used a similar approach on his mixtape, Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out, probably one of the best rap records that’ll be released this year.) It's not original, but it's a good path to follow. For all its differences from Wale's closest chart competitors, the music here (at least on the first half of the record) follows a path that was cleared as far back as the 90s: using the warm and lushly organic sound of peak-era Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder to reconnect hip-hop with a soulful revolutionary legacy that it turned away from when MCs started going in over 808 beats. ![]() In fact, it’s probably the most daring thing about The Gifted. That said, the fact that Wale’s decided to release such a left-field pop rap record at this point in his career is respectably daring.
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