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Jul 25, 2014Ab-Soul is still the third man up in the stacked TDE crew (behind Kendrick Lamar and Schoolboy Q), but this album establishes him as the group’s most reliable Swiss Army knife: deft in a wide variety of sonic and thematic situations.
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Jul 25, 2014He’s let the high filter out more of the revelation, and it sounds like a more accessible piece of entertainment than his last. It’s not the call to arms some expected, but Ab-Soul is as convincingly conspicuous as he’s ever been.
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Jul 25, 2014Ab’s creative leaps are sometimes jarring at the onset, such as “Closure” featuring Jhené Aiko, a track that will be deeply unsettling to the National Association of Backpacker Excellence among others.
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Jul 25, 2014These days, Soul’s money tree has blossomed and with it, expectations have grown and relationships and trust are harder to come by. But for now at least, Soul is in control.
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Jul 25, 2014That Ab-Soul tries to do both makes for a pretty entertaining ride, even when he technically falters. Ambition changes the definition of success, making this Ab-Soul record a better experience that can be picked apart.
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Jul 25, 2014The more human Ab-Soul dares to be on record, the stronger he becomes.
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Jul 25, 2014hese Days… isn’t the kind of sharp-to-the-touch effort that one associates with excellent rappers who eschew the mainstream.... It’s the start of a conversation; and one can only hope that he plans on finishing it.
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Jul 25, 2014Instead of another Black Hippy declaration, These Days... sounds very of-the-moment.
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Jul 25, 2014The self-proclaimed "Genius, idiot" succeeds for the most part in moving out of his sonic comfort zone while toeing the lyrical line between enlightenment and ignorance.
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Jul 25, 2014These Days… is a dense, complicated animal--even the blandest tracks have enough tricks to reward multiple listens, and may reveal themselves with time. But for someone so comfortable wearing his poetic heart on his sleeve, the black-lipped pastor has made an oddly distant album.
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Jul 25, 2014While These Days... does linger a bit too long in the depths of intoxication, it’s difficult to write this off as anything less than a solid indie release.
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Jul 25, 2014These Days... is a messy album: half completely unimpressive and half brilliant; botched skits; combined songs and an occasional identity crisis make judging the album as a cohesive whole very difficult indeed.
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Jul 25, 2014Ab-Soul puts out a solid release here, helped along by some big name features and big performances from his TDE labelmates, but at times These Days feels too generic or just flat out stale, ultimately failing to carry the Black Hippy torch in the ways that good kid m.A.A.d city and Oxymoron did for the crew.
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Jul 25, 2014He rarely strives for the depth of Lamar or the intensity of Q; there's plenty of clever imagery on These Days . . . ("Residue on my debit card/Don't tell my moms," he rhymes on "Ride Slow"), but a fully realized dude never quite comes into focus.
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Jul 25, 2014These Days is full of potentially enlightening ideas, and its beats and hooks are often mesmerizing, yet Ab-Soul spreads himself too thin here, his abstraction resulting from a kind of undertaken emaciation, a renunciation of tangible substance in favor of nebulous spiritual impressionism rather than from a perspective-driven distortion of this album’s strong central themes.
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Jul 25, 2014We got what feels like a very quickly thrown together product that lacks the depth and introspection of his previous projects.
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Jul 25, 2014Because Ab-Soul has pulled in every connection he has to feature on These Days (many of whom, including Jadakiss, Isaiah Rashad, BJ the Chicago Kid and Earl Sweatshirt, aren’t even credited because they’re doing background stuff), coupled with the fact that the beats are often too cluttered, feels like he’s just trying to throw everything at the wall in the hopes that something will stick so that Interscope will take notice and finally sign him.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 42 out of 58
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Mixed: 13 out of 58
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Negative: 3 out of 58
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Jul 27, 2014
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May 10, 2020
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Mar 19, 2019