On his latest carefree and careworn album, the Chicago rapper turns softer and more melodic, exploring his provisional success and the unanswered questions it keeps raising.
Early on in Few Good Things, a flicker of disquiet plays across Saba’s face as he drives through his new neighborhood: “I still get nostalgic driving past houses my family lost/They wished upon a star, I caught it like I’m Randy Moss.” There’s a lot packed into that couplet—bittersweet acknowledgment, lingering fear, uneasy pride. A moment later, the music surges into the foreground again, and Saba’s moment of doubt is washed away, a passing shadow on a perfect night.
Like Lupe Fiasco, one of his heroes, Saba’s muse is ambivalence. He’s attuned to the moments where a smile freezes, where two thoughts collide painfully and ripple across life’s surface. “Jesus got killed for his sins/Walter got killed for a coat,” he rapped on 2018’s CARE FOR ME, an album-length eulogy for his dead cousin. You could feel his roving mind searching for meaning the way a tongue probes a sore spot inside your mouth. On Few Good Things, Saba remains haunted, not by grief, but by his own provisional success and the unanswered questions it keeps raising.
Across the album, Saba endeavors to enjoy his spoils—new houses, nice clothes, days spent doing nothing but “playing Madden”—while trying not to glance back where he came from. Every new trapping, his lyrics suggest, might just be a trap: “New crib by the seaside/On a one-way street though” (“One Way or Every Nigga With a Budget”). Over the near-bossa-nova lilt of “Simpler Time,” a beautiful song featuring the Atlanta singer-songwriter Mereba, he raps, “White picket fence and a wreath on the door/We from the basement concrete on the floor.” Like anyone traumatized by scarcity, Saba can’t quite stop retracing his fraught path to abundance, scanning for land mines.
He continues to split duties on keyboards, guitars, bass, and drum programming with longtime producing partners Daoud and daedaePIVOT, and at its best, the music splits the difference between carefree and careworn. Remarkably, despite the looping, layered feel and the suggestion of vinyl crackle, almost no samples are used. Everything is handmade, from the muted boom of the kicks to the busy percussion in the margins, suggesting slapped kitchen tables and clinked spoons. Mimicking Noah “40” Shebib, they scoop out the keyboards’ midrange, leaving them to flutter from above. The overall feeling is of dreamy reverie—near the end of “2012,” we hear birds chirping.
As the trio has forged their sound, Saba’s flow has softened and turned more melodic. He works best when his voice is another instrument in the mix, freely mixing up registers between melody and rhythm. He sounded incredible on his 2016 debut next to fellow Chicago legend Twista, tucking his syllables into jazzy off-beats on “GPS”; he sounds equally natural here next to Krayzie Bone, the Bone Thugz legend who he’s cited as inspiration, on “Come My Way.”
He’s less convincing when attempting to follow in another idol’s footsteps. On “Survivor’s Guilt,” he clenches his teeth and spits a “DNA”-style Kendrick flow without ever quite catching K-Dot’s speaking-in-tongues fire. On “If I Had a Dollar,” he cops Kendrick’s high-pitched gremlin flow (what Schoolboy Q once dubbed his “Lord of the Rings voice”) from tracks like “Institutionalized.” In both cases, Saba comes off like an understudy.
Unlike Kendrick, whose music seethes and nearly thrashes itself apart with effort, Saba stands out when he leans back. His ideal register is gentler, his scale smaller. Late in Few Good Things, Black Thought appears, foregoing his militaristic snap for a disarming verse about his “South Carolina gullah” mother, who would “dip into a mental capoeira/When she staring into your soul, and you trying not to let her.” It’s as tender and low-key as the old Roots crew capo has ever let himself sound on record, and it’s a minor revelation. You have to assume that Saba’s music, with its will towards gentleness and belief in everyday redemption, pulled it out of him.
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