“Yaa I Get It,” the lead single for TSOL, finds Shadrach Kabango asking his listeners to forgive him for rapping about rap because the “the only thing he loves more than rapping is napping.” While rhyming those words has been played out since Edgar Allan Poe did it in “The Raven,” the 29-year-old Ontario native’s third album – TSOL – is actually chock full of more clever couplets and rhymes than you could tweet in a year.

Okayplayer had the audacity to declare Kabango – who is better known as Shad – “a far better rapper than Kanye” after listening to his sophomore release, The Old Prince, and this 40-minute collection of well written, super-savvy rhymes is more than enough to prove he’s worth the hype.

The production completely abandons the “basement rapper” vibe his previous two efforts sometimes displayed, and songs like “We, Myself, & I” and “Yaa I Get It” find Shad spitting rhymes with more emotion than he ever has before. The Me & John-produced tracks are legitimate headbangers, and the latter recalls the angry energy of Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.”

“Rose Garden” updates the old, Joe South-penned, country standard, “I Didn’t Promise You a Rose Garden,” and finds Shad managing to name drop Abraham, Issac, Jack Bauer, Glenn Beck, Gandhi, and Adolf Hitler in the span of two verses. Even though hearing him manipulate the English language to rhyme “Jesus” with “hard boobs” on “Listen” is impressive, Shad is most powerful when he lets himself use his skill to reflect on the state of his world.

“At the Same Time” is the album’s most stripped down track, but the lone guitar line and minimal percussion serve the song’s vibe well. It opens with Shad pondering the fact that he hasn’t “laughed and cried at the same time/‘til I heard a church pray for the death of Obama/and wondered if they knew that they shared that prayer with Osama,” and the introspection found on the nearly five-minute track is a welcome foil to the seeming limitless amount of witty lines Shad has tucked away in his arsenal.

In fact the hardest thing about listening to 'TSOL'' is deciding which side of Shad you like best, and that happens to be a very good problem to have.