‘Soul Burger’ is the sixth studio album from Ab-Soul, and it finds the Californian rapper, singer and Kendrick Lamar collaborator spit dynamic, versatile bars over an understated range of beats, motifs and samples. It is a decent enough hip hop album, with the occasional avant-garde flourish, but it doesn’t really deliver any bangers or live long in the memory.
Among the songs that get closest to that bar you have All That, featuring JasonMartin and Thirsty P. Here the three wordsmiths trade verses over a watery piano sample that gives the track a grimy, subterranean quality amid trap rhythms and bassiness.
Lyrically, it works within the same parameters as Oasis’s D’You Know What I Mean? — it's a bit of a tone poem on a lifestyle and attitude rather than a defined lyrical message: “Same soup, I just had to re-heat it / They know my name, I ain't have to repeat it.” That sort of thing.
There is also the Squeeze 1st 2, which is a riff on Jay Z’s Squeeze 1st. Despite the notable differences in sound the decision was taken to name the track as a direct sequel, which is a chronically under-used trick in pop songs.
This is one of the more fun tracks, with nice reverb flourishes and a lyrical flow that is rich and entertaining. Conceptually it feels fresh, even if the rule holds that a sequel rarely challenges the original for quality.
‘Soul Burger’ is competent, occasionally arresting stuff but it’s hard to make the case for this album as particularly urgent or groundbreaking. Towards the end of the record there is a nice turn from Lupe Fiasco on Peace, but once again the track is underpinned by low-slung production that doesn’t really excite.
It seems mad to describe an album with this much profanity and beef in the lyrics as such, but is ‘Soul Burger’ actually…quite boring? Maybe it is. Ab-Soul clearly has a lot of talent and drive, but this is not his best work. It’s too generic, too off the peg, too cliché-ridden, to rise above.
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