When he hits his stride here you can almost see him on stage, gleefully controlling a packed audience. Wale may not be a great thinker, but he’s an accomplished entertainer who seems to have inherited some of the unabashed “anything to please the crowd” attitude from go-go groups in his hometown of Washington, D.C. It’s absolutely ignorant as fuck, but at least it’s fun and, more vital, straight to the point. “Clappers”, the strongest track here, is a big, club-shaking bass anthem about girls with big butts. In the cruelest of ironies, the album only really starts to come together when Wale abandons the high concept conscious stuff and goes straight for the pop jugular. After days of listening to The Gifted on nearly constant rotation I can’t remember a single line from it. Wale seems to think that those records succeeded by their string arrangements and keyboard tones, and with accurate enough reproductions of those at his fingertips, he breezes past the part about writing lyrics that resonate with an audience enough to rattle their whole worldview.

The combination is a jumbled, awkward mess, capped by a wasted guest appearance by Jerry Seinfeld on an excruciatingly unfunny dialogue with Wale on The Gifted's outro. He’s attempting to tap into the magic that Marvin and Stevie created back then, but his understanding of what they did is bafflingly shallow. His approach to the album’s more explicitly soul-oriented tracks is to intersperse his library of 2013 rap cliches about his personal struggle to success with the occasional line about social injustice. 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.

Wale the gifted vk