Kanye West — Yeezus

Kanye West returns to release a solo project three years after the last time, after a collaborative record with Jay-Z and a compilation with members of his own label GOOD Music. West is inspired by minimalist design and architecture to conceive this musical album, as well as the house music of the eighties linked to Chicago and Alejandro Jodorowsky's film "The Holy Mountain" (1973). The original title of the disc is "Thank God for Drugs", then West decides on a blasphemous title that offends at least a couple of religions. West stays in Paris to start recording and enlists trusted collaborator No ID and his new friend DJ Khaled, a guarantor of quality music, for the sessions taking place in his hotel room in a hotel in the French capital. It's West's last CD released with Roc-A-Fella and one of the last ever for the label, which it shut down a few months later.

The production is realized by Kanye West, Daft Punk, Mike Dean, Benji B, Gesaffelstein, Brodinski, Lupe Fiasco, Jack Donoghue, Noah Goldstein, Hudson Mohawke, Bronfman, Travis Scott, Shama Joseph, Che Pope, Arca, Evian Christ, Dom Solo, 88-Keys, Carlos Broady, Lunice, S1, Ackee Juice Rockers, Eric Danchick and No ID. The only credited guest is Justin Vernon under the alias "God" — Kanye makes another gratuitous attack on religion, for whatever reason — while Frank Ocean, Chief Keef, Assassin, Kid Cudi, King L and Charlie Wilson are all uncredited.

Lacking adequate promotion, radio singles and a decent cover, the album, consisting of forty minutes of material and ten tracks (six are removed by Rubin in the last few days), obtains much lower sales results than expected, still managing to stand out first in the US (sixth in a row for West), UK, Canada, Australia, Denmark, New Zealand and Russia, enjoying great success across Europe, leaking online four days before release. It receives widespread critical acclaim and perfect scores from several magazines, especially in the UK, as well as being named album of the year by around a third of music critics, including "Chicago Sun-Times", "Entertainment Weekly", "The Guardian", "NOW Magazine", "TIME", "The A.V. Club", "Complex", "Consequence of Sound", "Rolling Stone", " Spin" and "Stereogum", who consider it West's best work, one of the best of the decade and one of his best in his career, at the expense of a quite polarizing audience response. West would like 15 Grammy nominations, he gets two (Best Rap Song with "New Slaves" and Best Rap Album) and loses both to Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.

Recorded in a few months, the album would be finished, but two weeks before release, the artist decides that Rick Rubin will be the executive producer of the disc: it's a smart choice, who better than Rubin to give the music the minimal, lo-fi and subtly skeletal look that the boy is looking for? Nobody. Rubin then removes all the "grease" of the original album and leaves only the bare essentials, Kanye West re-records entire tracks and verses, and the result is one of the most divisive records in Kanye West's discography alongside "808s". This is his most experimental and musically abrasive album, mixing many different genres and far from hip-hop, including industrial, punk, electro, Chicago drill and acid house, combined with atypical samples for a hip-hop record.

A harsh and hostile music comes out, discouraging, electronic, annoying and dirty, based on poor drum machines and heavy distorted synths, the more melodic songs are excluded from the definitive tracklist as well as those close to sounds already present in West's catalogue. The beats are sparse and seem to mimic the industrial production of records by better artists. When he's not singing or screaming hysterically, West's rapping is now lighthearted and simple, completely opposite to his previous solo CD, presenting a weak, uninteresting and annoyingly lazy delivery style, he sounds like a mediocre rapper, taking considerable steps backwards compared to the past also from this point of view, and massively and totally exaggerated use of the autotune, instrument on which the boy still puts too much faith.

The lyrics are some of the worst in his catalog, they seem written by children for no one, West just says stupid things in a completely random way, fueled by boatloads of crassness and unstoppable ignorance. The songs are empty and feel like scraps of "808s", they mostly suck from start to finish, the guy tries to experiment with industrial and it only works in one track, barely. In what should be one of his best and most brilliant moments, if not his greatest moment of shape, Kanye West insists on his ambition and produces one of his worst albums, annoying, forced, sleazy, often unlistenable, a slap in the mouth to the music, despite himself feeling that this LP is "much stronger" than his previous solo album. The title is ridiculous and offensive and the track titles are also offensive, not to mention the lyrics: it's precisely because of this album that his trusted parish priest calls him to himself and demands that from now on the boy repents and redeems herself for all the bad deeds done so far in his life and his musical career, with particular reference to song titles, devoting more time to religion in rap.

Rating: 4/10.