At TLA, the rap on Walé was bor-r-r-ing

So desperate are rap fans for fresh blood that the popularity of recent mix-tape champion Walé (wah-LAY) seems already to have peaked, possibly the same day he released his first official album, 2009's not-great-selling

Attention: Deficit

, which boasted guests ranging from Lady Gaga to TV on the Radio's David Sitek to Gucci Mane.

Now the main charge against the decidedly un-gangsta rapper seems to be the lack of a strong personality, which seems odd considering that his critical breakthrough was a Seinfeld-themed mix tape that even touched heartbreakingly on the Michael Richards incident. But at the TLA on Thursday with few guests and a simple stage setup, his stature as a blank canvas with potential became a whole other problem: He was stultifyingly dull.

In a set that brought to light his fatal dearth of memorable hooks, the rapper nonetheless found use in borrowing others', performing well-known detours like "W.A.L.E.D.A.N.C.E.," a YouTube special that cribbed Justice's mega-fun "D.A.N.C.E." and his verse from the Roots' go-go-inflected "Rising Up." But each song was abruptly cut off after a few minutes, even on a couple of occasions when the crowd had just begun singing along. For a guy well-versed in jamming with D.C. go-go bands, Walé was oddly negligent about keeping the crowd's momentum going when a tune showed legs.

A few songs in, he took a lengthy break to sit and rhapsodize while the DJ spun various old-school ephemera (House of Pain, Kris Kross) and then surprisingly, a bit of Kings of Leon's recent smash "Use Somebody," which got the biggest cheers of the night. It looked for an exciting minute as if he would rap over it; he didn't.

His own stuff didn't fare much better: "90210" proved you can't get a crowd to repeat "She throws up whenever she eats" very many times. And when girls from the audience were pulled onstage for the smarmy "Pretty Girls" ("Ugly girls be quiet"), even they looked kind of bored.

Around which point, Walé beckoned us to follow him on Twitter. He did seem to end every song in 140 characters or less.