Shad - TSOL (Review)

9/10

If you're like me, you probably can't go a day without people labelling the latest pop album to enter the charts a 'classic'. If so, you've probably developed a highly cynical attitude towards these so-called 'classics'.
Having that mindset myself, I was pleasantly surprised when I listened to this album and found myself genuinely amazed at the style Shad brings to his music. His intricate wordplay and witty, self-deprecating lyrics are unique in the shallow set of topics people rap about today. Match that with some beats which are pretty fantastic for an album with little major commercial backing and, dare I say it, TSOL becomes a near-classic album.
After a slow, melodic intro, Shad makes his first contribution to the album on 'Rose Garden'. If you've heard his previous albums you'll be expecting some great lyricism, and he delivers here with some well thought out rhymes.
The album continues in this fashion, the only changes being a couple of notable guest features from Ian Kamau and others. While I find Shad's slightly more serious songs, such as the display of his romantic side on 'Telephone' very good, I feel he really hits his peak on the up-tempo battle track 'Yaa I Get It'. Shad is really in his element here, spitting some lines creative enough to make Tha Carter IV look like something a lunatic asylum patient scribbled on his walls (then again, that was my first impression of Tha Carter IV anyway).
But I digress. After 'Yaa I Get It' we come to the back end of the album, and it's fair to say that Shad ends on a high note. After 'Listen', a song about the commercialised, dumbed-down music we hear today, comes 'At The Same Time', a truly brilliant track where Shad poetically describes the hypocritical nature of the modern world.
The album's outro features Shad rapping alone with no beat, more like a spoken word track. Usually I find acapellas dull, but Shad's lyrics are set free with no beat, and truly grasped me.

This album has very few flaws, but I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't point them out. On occasion, Shad seems to try a little to hard to get his metaphors across. He truly is an amazing rapper, but at extremely rare times his lyrics can seem a little laboured - 'We Are The Ones (Resevoir Music) is a perfect example of this. Fortunately, the playfulness of Shad's rapping allowed me to forget about this fairly quickly.

That one flaw aside, this album is pretty much perfect from start to finish. I whole-heartedly recommend TSOL and Shad's other albums to any rap or spoken-word fan who appreciates good lyrics when they hear them.

Below is the video for the first single and my favourite track from TSOL, 'Yaa I Get It'.