Sark Brought His A-Game But Highest Is An Okay Project

We waited a long time for Highest. Sarkodie has been promoting this album since last year and we had a lot of expectations for it. Taking the songs individually, Obidi gave us heat after heat with his verses. However, Highest as a complete project doesn’t seem to have the punch i’d have expected from an album that had Sark sticking with only features for most of last year and this year.

The one thing Sarkodie achieved or let’s say confirmed was that he is still the best to ever do the rap thing in Ghana. It’s been 8 years since his first studio album, Makye, which was an amazing project and probably his best till date. And in that time, he has led the pack in almost every way. So why is Highest not an impressive project? Let’s look into that.

There is a cohesiveness that makes the great albums great and Highest seems to be missing that. Like I said, Sarkodie shows his great abilities on each track but the album seems like he picked his favourite songs and put them together instead of choosing a complete set of songs that were made specifically for this project.

Another reason is the features on this album. Being the biggest artiste from Ghana, Sarkodie has at his disposal any artiste from Ghana he could have wanted for this album but his selection was surprising. Yes we have Joey B and Jayso but that was all Ghana had to offer in terms of the top names. Worlasi did great on Certified as Worlasi does but he is not a name you’d come up with if you were to guess who would make it on a highly anticipated Sarkodie album. Where is Shatta Wale, R2Bees or Mr. Eazi? He did great with his Naija features. Flavour, Korede Bello, Praiz, Jesse Jagz are all good choices but I’d have loved me some M.I.

Finally I think the one big reason why the album did not do it for me is that the Sark I love was not present on this album. The Sarkodie on this album is a beast, no disputing that. But listening to a serious and somewhat pissed-off-at-the-industry Sarkodie back to back instead of the Sark that gave us comedic flows that happened to be fire made this album less fun.

All the same, Sarkodie remains the highest and we are just grateful he gave us an album at all. Oh and six new videos.