Review Summary: We are more than one thing all at the same time.
Few Good Things is a vibrant, technicolour celebration of life's triumphs and joys.
Few Good Things is a heartbroken, shattered meditation on the things we lose and how we lose them. That both of these things are true and neither contradicts the other is a testament to the tonal tightrope Chicago's finest is able to walk. Saba, one of the deftest and cleverest artists working today, has an unerring talent for painting a full picture of life's ups and downs by flitting between tonal registers, as well as sequencing albums in a way that allows them to become more than the sum of their parts. You're not listening to a couple of hype singles and some filler to rack up Spotify numbers: his albums are a guided journey, a tour through the stages of his life as he grows up in real time.
"Let's acknowledge the full spectrum of black emotion when dealing with this album," asks an accompanying post from the artist. "We grieve. And also we celebrate. And we fuck. And we get money […] And we are more than one thing all at the same time." It's a heartfelt entreaty to embrace the album in its fullest - the pain, yes, but also joy and bittersweet nostalgia – without defaulting to easy comparisons to the family trauma that became the driving force behind his classic
CARE FOR ME. "The album for me acts kind of like a generational dialogue," the rapper says in an interview with Chicago Reader, placing the discussions of things like financial stability ("One Way...", "Fearmonger") and the trauma of war ("Soldier") into a larger context with causes and effects across generations. A recurring monologue throughout
Few Good Things from Saba's grandfather expands on his family's ties to Chicago, both a moving reminder of the complex family portrait painted on
CARE FOR ME and a lovely dedication to the city that Saba's music is so intensely tied to. "I think a lot of times when I feel like I'm going off the rails in whatever way, it's my community that usually is able to bring me back to it," Saba says, and it's clear that no matter how conflicted and complex it is, the rapper's love for Chicago remains at the essence of the music he makes.
It's absolutely fair for the man to say that
Few Good Things is concerned with a more diverse set of issues than its predecessor and should be noted as such. It's a rare artist who can unpack Big Topics like those above and still find time for a touching reflection on the days when he had everything and everyone he needed. That song, "2012", may be the latest high point in a discography with an embarrassment of such, if not actually the platonic ideal of a Saba song: a hazy beat summoning the bittersweet ghosts of memory while the artist dances deftly between heartbreak and grace, a perfected take on his earlier "PAPAYA", one of the most wistful renditions of falling in love ever put to tape. Indeed, Saba's defining trait as an artist - more than his elastic voice, abundant flows, or his enviable ability to flesh out a narrative arc - has always been his truthful pursuit of genuine beauty in his music, a kind of beauty that doesn't ignore but rather embraces the darknesses and brutalities of life. He finds it on "2012", on the silky-smooth 6LACK-and-Smino-featuring "Still" and the evergreen dedicated-to-mother joint "Make Believe"; these elegant tunes are the bright to the rest of the album's dark, from the aggressively dissonant "Survivor's Guilt" to the thoughtful meditation on failure "If I Had a Dollar".
It's an interesting evolution, losing
CARE FOR ME's grief-sharpened emotional focus for a more scattershot palette, but simultaneously trading that album's greyscale tonal register for a full blossom of colour, a contrast so inherent that it's reflected in their respective album artworks. That's Saba in a nutshell, the people's rapper who can talk his shit while still acknowledging the spectre of social anxiety over his everyday life, the only person who would let perhaps the greatest living rapper get the final word on his closer, then throw on a hidden track just to try and top the feature from motherfucking Black Thought. "Few Good Things" isn't an attempt to top the all-time great "PROM / KING" from Saba's last effort, even though it's a two-part rap epic that runs over seven minutes. No, this is a moment of clarity which runs the emotional gamut of the entire album one last time, acknowledging the pain and enjoy of the preceding 45 minutes without allowing itself to be defined by either. Good things come in fews, we're told several times by both rappers: whether you take that as an expression of hope or a cynical nod at the darkness is entirely up to you.
