Review Summary: West Side Chicago gets ethereal.
This mixtape is one of those tapes so inspired by the rapper’s environment that you are able to completely enter their view of the world. Saba is a product of his environment and so is his music.With clear influences from Keef, Kanye, and Chance, Saba manages to blend the city of Chicago into one excellent album that shows all of its beauty and ugliness. It’s a fascinating take on the city through the eyes of one that is in the zone between street life and the sheltered middle class. The addition of fellow underground Chicago artists like MC Tree completes the view. It’s not so much a day in the life as much as it is seeing their entire daily grind.
The lyricism is simple but the effect is much more profound than your usual backpack rap. Simple themes like “What will I be when I grow up?” become darker in the context of the rest of the verses about how different Saba is from his contemporaries on the streets. The hooks are simplistic and catchy but the verses are where Saba shines. The absolute best display of this is on the track “401k” where Saba raps on how the street grind is so damn appealing to young kids and school, jobs, and tax forms just aren't a way out for them.
And more importantly, Saba can spit. His flow is murderous. His wordplay may not be excessive but at the end of the day he can spit the words with such good breath control that you don’t even care. When he wants to go fast he can double time as well as Twista; when he wants to slow it down for a hook it’s so silky he could be an R&B singer.
Perhaps even more impressive than the rapping is Saba’s production skills. Self-produced, every beat is smooth and booming and highly reminiscent of the works by Sadboys or Lil Ugly Mane, but these are unique in that they are so deep that you can almost imagine them as drill beats widened out and then overlaid with thick production value. Every single track is pleasing to the ear and very relaxed even if Saba is spitting hard over-top. If there is a flaw with this tape it’s that the beats are just that ethereal and thick. There’s never a jarring or hard hitting beat so it’s easy to zone out and start to ignore the verses in favor of just relaxing. Even the clearly College Dropout era Kanye inspired track “For Y’all” suffers from being so casual and relaxing. It’s very easy to lose track of what song you’re on since the beats are so similar. They’re good, just rather repetitive.
This isn’t some backpacker’s view of how to save a city from gang violence nor is it a drill album praising street life. It’s a complex and adventurous take into what is simply a way of living in a city known for both artistic genius and bloody violence. Saba may have taken from his favorite artists but in this case it makes him unique, not a biter. I fully expect for Saba to blow up in the upcoming years and I suggest you keep watch on him as well.
