Skip to main content

Review: Kanye West - Yeezus

Rating: 6.6

Up until now, Kanye's always made music like The Beatles: high quality, palatable, and not particularly emotionally resonant. Yeezus is a completely different beast. It's somewhere between the Sex Pistols and early Nine Inch Nails. It's got brutal, simple electronic sounds and a punk mentality.  Kanye's apparently moved past Common and thrown his lot in with Chief Keef. I don't think he could've done anything more misguided. Look at it this way:

Kanye's Strengths:
Writing and finding great melodies
Layering sound

Kanye's Weaknesses:
Drum programming
Rapping (all of it - lyrics, flow & rhyming)

Yet, for some reason, he's roped in Rick Rubin to remove everything that plays to his strengths and focus entirely on his weaknesses. It's like asking a drum 'n bass producer to cut out the low end and make a Brian Eno album. There's no way you're gonna get good results. Now, I will admit that, if you are looking for anger in sonic form, Yeezus does a pretty good job. Unfortunately, if you're looking for quality music, you're gonna have better luck just about anywhere else.

Amazingly, critics and fans are still in love. If nothing else, this cements Kanye's position as the most respected artist in music today. No one else could've received such accolades for something so mediocre. Even Radiohead couldn't get the benefit of the doubt to this degree when they released the similarly mediocre King of Limbs a few years ago. Who knows, maybe this'll be the Never Mind the Bullocks of rap: a mediocre album that that, nevertheless, changes the genre and garners lasting respect. Probably not though.

 Key Tracks: The Chorus of Bound 2

Track-by-Track Rating:
  1. On Sight - 7.0
  2. Black Skinhead - 7.5
  3. I Am a God - 7.0
  4. New Slaves - 7.5
  5. Hold My Liquor - 6.0
  6. I'm in It - 5.5
  7. Blood on the Leaves - 6.0
  8. Guilt Trip - 5.0
  9. Send It Up - 5.0
  10. Bound 2 - 7.5

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Greatest Song of All Time

The music business has its fair share of complexities, as you would expect from any business with such a long history, and that is, at its core, built upon international law (i.e. copyright). That complexity is almost always hidden from the listening public. However, one piece that is curiously exposed every year when the Grammys come around is the separation between what is a "record" and what is a "song". The second and third most prestigious awards at the Grammys are, respectively, "Song of the Year," and "Record of the Year." What's the difference? Most people, including most musicians, wouldn't be able to tell you. I couldn't either until I took a music industry course in college where someone finally explained it to me: A "song" is melody and lyrics. The best way I have to think if it is, if hear someone play a faithful-to-the-original, acoustic cover, the "song" is what would be the same between the orig...
Post a Comment
Read more

Best Musical Snippets of 2013

It's always great when you get a song that's consistently great from beginning to end, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.  Sometimes you get songs where a certain section clearly stands out from the rest. Here's a few from this year: The Chorus of Kanye West's Bound 2 : The soul sample that occupies the rest of the song is soul only in name.  It approximates College Dropout-era Kanye with none of the warmth and, well, soul that made those tracks great.  The chorus is the exact opposite.  It uses the electronic music technique of putting a soulful male voice over a bass-heavy beat to create something emotive and genuinely soulful. The 3rd Minute of Youth Lagoon's Mute : Most of the song is nothing but warm, hazy fuzz, but, for about a minute, Trevor Powers cuts through that fuzz with a soaring, uplifting melody that Bono would be jealous of. The Pre-Chorus of Vampire Weekend's Unbelievers : One of two things this year that absolutely blew me away...
Post a Comment
Read more