Oh boy. Unless by some miracle Kendrick drops in 2016, here we have most likely the biggest rap release of 2016. The release of this thing was torture - I checked twitter every two hours between the originally specified release date and the it's real release, and every time, Kanye had something new to say. New track listing this! New track listing that! Sorry everyone, blame Chance for the delay! And when it finally dropped, it was a Tidal exclusive. No iTunes, no CD's, nothing. Fucking hell.
The Life Of Pablo serves as Kanye's seventh full studio album, and his follow up to 2013's Yeezus. An album which had a shock-and-awe impact with fans, but most critics loved it to death. After just coming down from the stellar My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which is easily his best album on this side of Late Registration. nobody was expecting anything even close to what Yeezus was. Opener "On Sight" was enough for most fans to spit it out right away - me included. The good news was, Kanye's never done the same thing twice, so there was a good chance that TLOP would be a better album. Wrong. Don't get me wrong, it is different to Yeezus. But better? TLOP, being subject to so many last minute changes as it was, the end result still seems to be only 50% complete. Kanye's past albums (the great ones, at least) had themes that he stuck with from start to finish, be it dropping out of college, heartbreak, or a scathing self-examination about how much of a douche bag he really was. But that's not the case here. It feels like Kanye took the final track list, compiled in the perfect order to document a humbled realization about the come-down from fame, (which you can see from the first track list he tweeted) played it on shuffle, and then used whatever the result was in an attempt to be artsy. While I think that's kind of a cool idea, it doesn't work at all. The album begins with 'Ultralight Beam'. My opinions on this particular album may not be that favorable, I will give credit where it's due - this song is one of Kanye's best. This is almost like a 'Jesus Walks' part 2; with the lyrics "We on an Ultralight Beam, we on an Ultralight Beam, this is a god dream, this is everything" sung with an incredible choir performance and vocals from The-Dream and Kelly Price.And even more than that, it's a torch-passing - Jay-Z handed it to Kanye in 2004, and in 2016, Kanye hands it to Chance The Rapper. His verse is joyous and ecstatic. The first rap album he ever purchased was The College Dropout and now he's on a Kanye West album. His bars are elevated to a spiritual level, praising God, thanking him, and altogether celebrating the fact his career led him to this moment. It's shimmering, it's incandescent, it's beautiful. But it doesn't take long for the quality to drop off. The very first lines that Kanye raps on this album are on the second track, 'Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1' (which he claimed he cried while writing) and here they are "Now if I fuck this model / and she just bleached her asshole / and I get bleach on my T-shirt / I’ma feel like an asshole". This sums up exactly how I feel about this line. It's easily his worst lyric to date, and this overtakes all of Yeezus. 'Pt. 2' of the song isn't as bad, and it has a racy beat, but Kanye got an artist called Desiigner to put vocals over this, and it's just another trap-rap song we've all heard before at that point. Many tracks fall into this same mediocrity - not exactly all for the same reason, but the end results on many are the same. 'Feedback' is just 'On Sight' rehashed. 'Low Lights' is the most annoying two minutes I've ever had to sit through, 'Highlights' has another line that is almost bad as the afore-mentioned; "Sometimes I'm wishin' that my dick had, GoPro / So I can play that shit back, in slow-mo". I still have no clue what the hell 'Freestyle 4' is. He demands sex from a woman, and then wonders that if they started fucking on the dinner table, would everybody else start fucking. Now, we get a slight recovery from this point - 'I Love Kanye' is a funny freestyle if you take it with a grain of salt (which is difficult to do, I will admit) and after that is the song 'Waves'. In my opinion, this is one of the better instrumentals on The Life Of Pablo, but like many tracks, Kanye doesn't really say much when it's his turn to rap / sing / whatever. Chris Brown dominates most of the song, but it's still enjoyable enough. Other good tracks on this side of the album include 'Real Friends' where Kanye finally sounds focused. Kanye raps best when he's trying to prove that he can, and this song is reminiscent of the bars he would rap on back in 04 and 05. Clever, definitely not cringe-enducing, and with the style where you can tell he's passionate, but also not taking himself too seriously. 'No More Parties In L.A.' is up there with 'Ultralight Beam' for best track on the album, and that's not even because of the Kendrick Lamar feature. Which was of course good, but surprisingly isn't the best part of the song. Madlib fans are going to recognize who was involved with this beat straight away, and Kanye absolutely steals the show with almost 3 minutes of non-stop rapping. Which is something we're desperate to hear from Yeezy in this day and age, what with all the singing. I liked 808's & Heartbreak, because singing was the point. But when he sings on this album, it almost always has me crawling back to tracks like these. TLOP has some major highs. These three tracks - 'Ultralight Beam', 'Real Friends' & 'No More Parties In L.A.' are easily the best three rap songs of 2016 so far. But the rest of the album just doesn't live up to these at all. My least favourite overall song has to be '30 Hours', which is by far his most boring song yet. The first 2 minutes feature some decent rapping, but after that? It's so listless. When Kanye albums were good, extending the beats for longer periods of time always came off well, because the beats were actually worth listening to, for example, "Say You Will" and "Devil In A New Dress". But on this song, it's a drum, a bass line, and awfully bland background vocals. For a whole three minutes, we sit through that, for the so climactic ending - he gets a phone call, and says "I'm just doin' an adlib track right now, wassup". That's it. How does he think this is genius? Kanye's been too obsessed with himself for too long, and it's gotten into his head. The feeling that this album gives me is that Kanye considers all music he makes to be the best music of all time, no matter how bad it is, and he considers this as solid, undeniable fact. Which it clearly isn't. It's just boring and embarrassing. There are flashes of genius - there's no doubt about that - but there aren't enough. 5.0/10 |
201820162015Scores0-30 = Bad
31-49 = Sub-par 50-60 = Average 61-70 = Decent 71-80 = Good 81-89 = Great 90-99 = Incredible 100 = Perfect Archives
September 2018
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