Wale ‘The Album About Nothing’ Review By: Kyle Pinaro

Posted on April 4, 2015 by sparxteam in Home, Music, Sparx Exclusive, The Pinaro Reviews // 0 Comments

The Album About Nothing Review

By: Kyle Pinaro

Wale is a wildly ambitious rapper. He has never reached as many people as he would like to, and he’s never had a global or even national hit, but he’s had songs that are popular in the streets and obviously to his fans but that’s really it. Personally I’ve always found him to be somewhat average, although he begs to differ. I’ve preferred his features over his solo material, but when he announced he would be continuing his Seinfeld themed mix tape series with an album AND featuring Jerry Seinfeld himself, I was excited.

He gave us a little taste of what was to come at the end of his last solo effort The Gifted and it seemed to have a lot of promise going for it. Personally his “nothing” series is very well laid out, it’s all connected and cohesive. It’s really one of the rare thematic projects that actually follow what it’s trying to do. How does the album stand up to the mix tapes?

It shows a whole lot of growth in Wale’s delivery and execution, and the album is actually good. Wale delivers some of his best lines in years on this LP and I was genuinely impressed at times. “The Intro About Nothing” kicks off the album with a slow melodic piano driven beat that gets monotonous at first, but after the beat switch up to the choir and snares the album really sort of takes off. It’s also worth noting that every song starts with “The” just like every Seinfeld episode, and every song either begins with an excerpt from an episode that compliments the song title and the subject matter as well.

While there are noticeable changes in Wale’s music, a lot of it tends to get boring. It’s commendable that the music goes with the theme but the album has little to no substance. There’s no radio smashes to save help the album and there’s no skits of Jerry Seinfeld throughout the album. As a matter of fact, everything is taken from episodes or even videos of them speaking. It seems that Seinfeld’s material, if any was even formally recorded, was thrown away or deemed unusable.

The Album About Nothing is a body of work that may get better with age, but right now it’s just wildly average. The album on paper sounds like something that could be one of the best albums of the year, but as it materialized it sort of fell flat. If you’re a Wale fan you’ll appreciate this for what it is, but it certainly doesn’t live up to the mix tape series.