'Soul Burger' by Ab-Soul - Album Review

Undoubtedly one of the best on the pen, even if he doesn’t consistently satisfy my ears.

★★★¼

Ab-Soul has always been a polarising rapper to me. I absolutely adore his pen game, in fact I believe he is one of the more talented rappers of this generation, I just have never been fully sold with his music sonically. Especially when he goes for a more laid back delivery, I just find myself growing uninterested with what he is saying, which is exactly what I DON’T want to do. 

My only previous experiences with Ab-Soul’s music are his emphatic sophomore album ‘Control System’ and his deeply introspective 2022 effort ‘Herbert’. With both of these albums there are elements I absolutely adore, I love how his writing reflects his desire to prove he is one of the best in the industry across ‘Control System’. And with ‘Herbert’, I really admire how he has the complete opposite approach. He tries his best to put his ego to the side and just get really personal over some of the most lush production you’ll hear in his catalogue. My main issue with his music however is his delivery. He just consistently sounds super uninterested. Now on more aggressive cuts, like shown in this new album, he brings some nice energy, but the fact that throughout most of his music he portrays himself to be a lowkey wordsmith means his delivery will largely reflect that. It’s not even that I think he’s a boring artist, he just doesn’t have the capacity to keep me engaged. There were so so many times when listening to all three albums that I’ve mentioned where I’ll be enjoying the production or features and just completely clock out whenever Soul comes on the mic, thus missing potentially important narrative plot points in the songs. 

Luckily for me, this album has a lot more highs than it does lows. There are still tracks across here that are perpetrators of my usual thoughts on his music, whether it’s an issue of him sounding uninterested or just flat-out awkward, but largely he piques my interest. His choice of features on here is absolutely catered to me, okay maybe it isn’t but it definitely feels like it. Vince Staples tries his best not to stand out more than the rest on ‘California Dream’, but ultimately in Vince fashion he absolutely shines. He fits the beat so damn well, it’s a perfect choice from Soul. Fre$h complements Soul really well which leads to some nice back-and-forths on ‘Don Julio 70’. Doechii has very minimal participation on ‘I, Myself & Me’, only providing some backing vocals for the song’s hook, however what she does bring is a very nice, subdued performance to give the song a beautiful atmosphere. The biggest highlight in terms of the features however is definitely Lupe Fiasco on ‘Peace’. In all honesty, Lupe’s verse on here might be my favourite performance on the entire album, but realistically if you are planning on including a Lupe feature on your album you should be expecting nothing less. 

Now that we got the features out the way, Soul did really well on this album too. Lyrically he is as sharp as ever: his rhyming is super clean, working in numerous internal rhyme schemes as smoothly as he can as shown in ‘9 Mile’ and ‘Squeeze 1st 2’; his wordplay is consistently super clever, making for a number of great punchlines like in ‘Crazier’ when he said “My G, this just in, Herbert on your back, I charge a n**** for a rap, I'ma need more than a quarter back”; he has numerous great quotables across this record too, for example “It ain't hard to tell like Sonic's little homie” and “We be to rap what key be to lock, Hand me my keys, then I skate off the lot”. Only issue I have with him lyrically is the consistency of his flow. For a majority of the album, his flow is great. They fit the beat well a lot of the time, he can be really good at switching his flow up very smoothly and he often has very catchy sounding flows like on ‘Paiday’ and ‘Go Pro’ but there are quite a few instances on this album where it feels like he’s fighting against the beat, however I’ll go into more depth on this later in the review. On top of that, there is so much substance in what Soul is saying across this project. The themes of self-reflection, ambition, growth and personal pain are scattered throughout this record. From the reflection of Soul’s escape from the gang life in ‘California Dream’, to the super hopeful proclamation of how he’s made it in the rap game on ‘The Sky Is Limitless’ to the super captivating closer, telling the story of a gang member and the internal conflict they deal with between their moral compass and the life they have chose. The introductory and final tracks of this album are definitely the best in my opinion. Which in a way is good because it means Soul opened and closed very strongly, but also means that there is definitely some inconsistency dotted throughout this record. However, to expand on that point a little, the run of four or five tracks at both the beginning and end of the album are really strong, it’s just throughout the middle section where it gets a bit tough.

Now the specific gripes I have with this album. Starting off with the track I didn’t like from the beginning, and after multiple re-listens I still can’t stand, ‘B.U.C.K.O JR’. This song is so painfully awkward to me. Soul’s flow is so off on here, it sounds like he started rapping before the beat started and is constantly taking long pauses in his verse so the beat can catch up to his flow, but it still never does. It’s over four minutes of a continuously drawn-out flow that never is in time with the instrumental. ‘Dnd’ is a track where the verses are quite good, Soul isn’t bad at all on his verse. However the hook is a prime example of why I could never properly listen to his previous music. He’s so deadpan and dull on here it just completely takes me out of the track, even after Niq’s great verse. ‘Saudi Sweats’ has a very underwhelming beat. It feels like it is constantly building up to a massive beat drop, and to its credit there is a beat drop. When it does drop however, not only is there only like half a minute left of the song, but the tone of the second beat is hardly different from the first. The actual instrumental that Soul raps on sounds like a lovely beat you would hear for the first 30-ish seconds of a song before it drops to a really emphatic, 808-heavy instrumental for the rest of the song. Not one that is the main base of a rap song. ‘Crazier’ is another critique of instrumental choice. Soul and JID absolutely snap on their verses, the beat just doesn’t fit them at all. It’s super ominous and claustrophobic sounding, just doesn’t compliment their respective voices in the slightest. Those are the only specific, huge downsides I have with this album. Other drawbacks are just what I iterated earlier with Soul sounding a little bit bland and uninteresting which is shown on songs like ‘All That’, ‘California Dream’ and ‘I, Myself & Me’. 

Ultimately, I don’t think Soul’s sound will ever be for me. Hopefully I can either be proven wrong in the future or at least have his sound click randomly at some point. But for now I’m stuck in the realm where I love hearing what he has to say but I’m so uninterested in how he delivers it. Despite my very obvious dislikes of his style, this album has so many really good tracks. Tracks like ‘Peace’, ‘9 Mile’, ‘Squeeze 1st 2’ and ‘Righteous Man’ could all end up being some of my favourite hip-hop songs of the year. Lyrically he is also still elite as previously mentioned, however it sadly takes me multiple listens to even figure that fact out.