If nothing else, J. Cole has made it abundantly clear that he wants to be judged alongside rap's all-time greats. So let's do that: Revenge of the Dreamers II, the new nine-song compilation from his Interscope imprint, Dreamville Records, is not The *Dynasty—*it doesn't have the color, the heart-wrenching personal asides, the 1-900 numbers that teach you how to sell crack. Nor does it have the slick condescension of any Bad Boy collaboration, the virtuosity of Soundbombing, the knowing sneer of anything the Diplomats made on their worst day.

The problem with Revenge of the Dreamers II, beyond the absence of a "This Can't Be Life" or a "Dipset Anthem," is the same as the problem with much of Cole's solo catalog: In his desperation to be canonized beside his idols, he shies away from the risks they took to earn those spots. His performance on a song-by-song basis from his debut, Cole World: The Sideline Story, to last December's 2014 Forest Hills Drive oscillates wildly, but never shakes the feeling that it's checking boxes, doing X because Kanye did and Y because Pac did.

Take the opener, "Folgers Crystals," where Cole compares himself to Bob Marley and Nat Turner in the first handful of bars. In many ways, his background is remarkable; the Fayetteville, N.C. native has detailed his experiences in schools with various socioeconomic makeups, including his time at St. John's University in New York. (As always, his rapping on Revenge owes more to the latter locale.) His plan to turn his childhood home—on Forest Hills Drive—into a shelter where single mothers can live rent-free is not just admirable, but is a sincere, inspired way to alleviate the conditions he grew up in and around. But in Cole's more serious writing, most of that personal touch is filtered out, replaced by blunt aphorisms: "'Cause still I rise, it's ill-advised to bet against him/ Raised in hell but heaven sent him/ Let 'em diss him."

That kind of toothless penmanship might slide if it weren't delivered so deliberately. Cole's always been at his best when the stakes are low, or at least self-contained; when he's rapping for its own sake, or reveling in the fact that he signed his friends ("Night Job"), he can be a well above-average technician. (To be fair, that song is nearly derailed when he says he's "Horny like that Coltrane album," one of a handful of sex-centric bars that he and his Queens-bred signee Bas inexplicably cling to.) But when he's moralizing or getting somber, it's robotic, as with "Caged Bird"'s refrain, "Freedom's just an illusion/ That's my conclusion." On "Crystals," he punctuates a particularly intense, clumsy passage with, "So you can take my cock and chew on it," a line that needs a wink or some levity to redeem itself, but is given neither.

Fumbled legacy-building though it is, Dreamers is not without its bright spots. The tape introduces the label's two newest signees: the Washington, D.C.-bred singer Ari Lennox and lute, a rapper from Charlotte who joins Cole in representing North Carolina. Each artist contributes one song here, both of which are among the best on the tape; lute's Dilla-cribbing "Still Slummin" in particular is superb, throwing you immediately into his world ("Took off my work badge, realized I'm back in the hood") and dispensing plaintive, delightfully un-cinematic notes: "Lost more friends to bullshit than a bullet."

Lennox's introduction comes in the form of "Backseat," a song that racked up tens of thousands of plays between its October 2014 release and when it was scrubbed from the Internet last month. It's a knowing, slinking cut that succeeds on almost every front: fun, warm, a little sleazy. Cozz, the Los Angeles rapper who inked his Dreamville deal last year, updates the single with an uncharacteristically flat verse; fortunately, his later contributions to the tape, "Tabs" and especially the introspective closer "Grow," are excellent. (His pre-Interscope singles "Dreams" and "I Need That" remain two of the most delightfully menacing street rap songs of the past several years.)

Bas—whose braying "Housewives" is the weakest cut by a country mile—is joined in Dreamville's relative old guard by Omen, a Chicago native. He and Cole mostly sleepwalk through "Caged Bird," but his headlining song, the Donnie Trumpet-assisted "48 Laws," is a welcome contrast; Omen finds the kind of pocket that always seems to elude his more famous partner, and it makes for a sleek, collected track that feels immediately more vibrant than any of the tape's weightier material. And that, in many respects, is Revenge of the Dreamers II: compelling when its focus is at its most narrow, leaden and impersonal when it reaches for the Very Serious and Very Important. It's like Bleek said: "The strong move quiet, the weak start riots/ We know you got a brick but sell 'em 20s 'til they tired."