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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