Ab soul second album full#
Ab soul second album mac#

Hell, the first song might be exactly what you'd expect from Ab-Soul going hard as hell, literally taking shots at Jay Electronica for going at Kendrick and full of some ridiculously well-crafted bars against this huge gothic swell with bells and seething guitars - although, like usual with Ab-Soul we get a few corny pieces like comparing his choppers to PF Chang and Benihana or saying that his fur lined boots have him cozy. But if these days was lodged in a haze of its own making both in the production and content, right out of the gate Do What Thou Wilt. And that's not entirely unfamiliar from Ab-Soul, especially given his previous two albums. Now what this means is that the typical metric for whether or not this record is good goes completely out the window - well, at least to some extent, there is still art that is being created with elements like production and bars that should be considered, but lyrically and thematically this is a different animal, and it's going to take some deeper examination to figure out if this successful troll is in fact successful.īut some of you might be asking why I even came to this conclusion - after all, it sounds like what you'd expect from Ab-Soul's too clever by half hedonism, full of weird references cribbed from religion and philosophy texts blended with sex, drugs, and a lot more sex and drugs. These albums are rare, but they definitely exist - and with Do What Thou Wilt., Ab-Soul joins that proud tradition of trolling the hell out of anyone who might take him seriously. Because every once in a while, an artist who is normally taken seriously decides that he wants to screw with his audience, with critics, and anyone else who will listen. Well, we haven't gotten something like this in a long time, that's for sure, and something that always amuses me when it does show up.

Ab soul second album mac#

I expected Mac Miller, they've worked together before, but Rapsody, Bas from Dreamville, Da$h from the A$AP Mob, and even Kokane, an oldschool veteran who started his career with Eazy-E? So yeah, I was curious - what did we get from Do What Thou Wilt.? I was more surprised than I probably should be that there was no Kendrick verse - he's consistently shown up Ab-Soul every time he's been on one of his records - but outside of ScHoolboy Q, Punch, and SZA, Ab-Soul seemed to be pulling from outside of TDE for this. But there was a part of me that still had real hope Ab-Soul could pull this off, although his list of guest stars was certainly different than I was expecting.

Hell, that's one of the reasons why I'm not all that surprised that it took so long for my Patreon voters to push this to the top of the schedule, maybe some of that spark had died out in comparison to his peers who had been more consistent or who had pushed out more interesting projects.

I don't what to tell you, he's slipped towards corniness more often I'd really excuse and he's still not a consistently strong wordsmith in terms of constructing his bars. And ever since then, I've heard plenty of guest verses from him, from collaborations with The Game to Jay Rock to Danny Brown and while so many have praised him, I've been consistently underwhelmed. I'll be blunt, I was probably too easy on that record when I reviewed it, trying to search for deeper themes or satirical elements that didn't coalesce, and when the hooks just weren't there to match the production or slew of guest verses that were really all over the place, I found myself looking for reasons to like it and coming up short. I had a lot of hope that on future projects he'd be able to refine his ideas and sound into something that was sharper and harder and more cohesive.Īnd then he released These Days. His breakthrough project Control System was a great record, with the sort of creativity and ideas that made for thought-provoking listens and could compensate for wordplay that either slid towards corniness or revealed more flaws than can really be excused. Okay, that's a misleading statement, because for the most part I do like this guy. I feel like I should like Ab-Soul so much more than I do.