Wale’s third official album, The Gifted, had the bad luck to come out a week after Kanye’s Yeezus. It’s terrible timing for any pop album; for the former backpack rapper who found unexpected mainstream pop success who went into the studio to attempt a singular, definitive artistic statement, it's bound to set up some unfair comparisons. There’s also a vaguely beefy line in “Heaven’s Afternoon” about how Wale wears Givenchy but doesn’t wear kilts that doesn’t help the situation.

That said, the fact that Wale’s decided to release such a left-field pop rap record at this point in his career is respectably daring. In fact, it’s probably the most daring thing about The Gifted. For all its differences from Wale's closest chart competitors, the music here (at least on the first half of the record) follows a path that was cleared as far back as the 90s: using the warm and lushly organic sound of peak-era Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder to reconnect hip-hop with a soulful revolutionary legacy that it turned away from when MCs started going in over 808 beats. It's not original, but it's a good path to follow. (Chicago rapper Tree recently used a similar approach on his mixtape, Sunday School II: When Church Lets Out, probably one of the best rap records that’ll be released this year.)

The music on The Gifted sounds fantastic, with intricately arranged keys and strings, stacks of soul and gospel-inspired backup vocals, and deep, rubbery bass lines. The problem is that Wale and his team made a really decent soul rap album without a rapper soulful enough to carry it. He’s a capable, sometimes personable MC, but he’s not an especially compelling one. His approach to the album’s more explicitly soul-oriented tracks is to intersperse his library of 2013 rap cliches about his personal struggle to success with the occasional line about social injustice. The combination is a jumbled, awkward mess, capped by a wasted guest appearance by Jerry Seinfeld on an excruciatingly unfunny dialogue with Wale on The Gifted's outro. He’s attempting to tap into the magic that Marvin and Stevie created back then, but his understanding of what they did is bafflingly shallow. Wale seems to think that those records succeeded by their string arrangements and keyboard tones, and with accurate enough reproductions of those at his fingertips, he breezes past the part about writing lyrics that resonate with an audience enough to rattle their whole worldview. After days of listening to The Gifted on nearly constant rotation I can’t remember a single line from it.

In the cruelest of ironies, the album only really starts to come together when Wale abandons the high concept conscious stuff and goes straight for the pop jugular. “Clappers”, the strongest track here, is a big, club-shaking bass anthem about girls with big butts. It’s absolutely ignorant as fuck, but at least it’s fun and, more vital, straight to the point. Wale may not be a great thinker, but he’s an accomplished entertainer who seems to have inherited some of the unabashed “anything to please the crowd” attitude from go-go groups in his hometown of Washington, D.C. When he hits his stride here you can almost see him on stage, gleefully controlling a packed audience.

What seems to be the main purpose of the record is to elevate Wale beyond the level of Rick Ross’ reliable second-stringer, a guy who’s capable of dropping the occasional strip club anthem in between a steady string of unremarkable features on pop songs. “Clappers” proves that when he embraces that job he’s actually really good at it. But if he wants to be taken as a serious artist like the ones he spends most of the record emulating, he’s going to have to start taking some real chances and get real far out of the box, out to place where people are known to wear kilts.