In early 2019, Kanye West founded his own gospel group, Sunday Service Choir, with whom he sings every Sunday in church, often remixes of songs from his own discography in a gospel, religious and Catholic key. In December 2019, West released the first album of the group, a direct follow-up to his previous solo record, "Jesus Is King", a Christian-themed gospel CD released two months earlier.
For the first time in Kanye West's artistic career, the album isn't delayed and is released the same day it was scheduled to be released, thus respecting the release date, a more unique than rare event in West's artistic life. There are no delays, there are no controversies, everything works. The production is done by Jason White, Nikki Grier, Federico Vindver, Philip Cornish and Budgie, as well as West. There are no guests. Although he's credited to the Sunday Service Choir gospel group, several newspapers and publications consider the record to be part of Kanye West's discography.
Self-released through the INC label with no promotion and no singles, the album is ignored by most of the specialized critics and the few professionals who notice the release welcome the project in a positive way. The album debuted at number two on the gospel albums chart, preceded by its prequel, West's latest solo record, and is the second best-selling gospel album of 2020 after that prequel. The product also ranks third in the UK gospel chart. 9 out of 19 songs end up on the US gospel chart, "Father Stretch" has the best performance and reaches the top ten.
The project is a lean gospel record inspired by the mixtape "Coloring Book" by Chance the Rapper and some songs released by the rapper on that album and in his subsequent works, this effort is focused on the figure of Kanye West as a born-again Christian, although the boy isn't performing on the disc, leaving the execution to hundreds of singers and singers. The gospel music is refreshingly generic and average, the singing is fine and the background singers do an enjoyable job, there's nothing wrong with this effort, the lyrics are also positive and are about religion, biblical stuff and other catholic stuff, in fact maybe the lyricism is sub-par even by gospel album standards and it must be pointed out that these are actually songs taken and inspired by Kanye West's discography, not the greatest writer in hip-hop — it seems that he didn't write any of his first four studio albums, reciting the lyrics directly into the microphone without writing them: this effort by the Sunday Service Choir group takes old Kanye songs from across his discography and transforms them into new gospel versions.
At 84 minutes, almost an hour and a half, and 19 tracks to explore, the album is exaggerated and excessively stretched and with the exception of a number of songs from "The Life of Pablo" at the beginning of the album and a few other tracks, this CD doesn't have much to offer even Kanye West fans. Difficult to advocate listening to it although it's not a disastrous tape. 4/10.
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