So Far Gone Review

Filed as a mixtape, sold afterwards as a shortened commercial release, and treated ever since by listeners and by its maker as the record where the thing began, which is why it is graded here as an album. The sound is a producer's achievement as much as a rapper's: cavernous reverb, half speed drums, keyboards pitched somewhere between soul and ambient, and a voice that slides between rapping and singing without ever announcing the switch.

Best I Ever Had is the pop song. Houstatlantavegas is the blueprint for a thousand sad club records. Successful is where the formula locks, a slow four chord loop and a hook about wanting money and women delivered flatly enough to read as emptiness rather than boast. The writing is young. There are corny lines and a lot of self pity presented as insight. But nothing else in 2009 sounded like this, and within two years everything did.