![]() That same tongue-in-cheek sensibility re-emerges on "No More Parties in LA," with a snappy verse from Kendrick Lamar and bonus points for rhyming "spiritual" and "Cap'n Crunch cereal."īut West's self-scrutiny turns defensive on "Real Friends," which moves from a critique of his own thoughtlessness into a series of complaints that his friends don't recognize just how busy he really is. … I miss the old Kanye," affirming one of his earlier strengths: an ability to laugh at himself. In another track, West proclaims, "I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye. ![]() It sounds even more haunted with the wordless vocals of Caroline Shaw and an eerie coda from Frank Ocean. Family also centers "Wolves," reworked considerably from its public debut last year. That's particularly true of "FML," in which he enlists the Weeknd to underline how he struggles to remain devoted in his marriage. That's not necessarily bad news because for several years, the best moments on West albums have been those in which he turns his brutal honesty inward. This is a religious album, all right - the religion of Kanye. "This is a God dream," West announces on the opening "Ultralight Beam," but he's not exactly walking in Saul's sandals. Meanwhile, he had quite a week on social media: defending Bill Cosby, dissing Taylor Swift (again) in an oft-quoted series of song lyrics, and begging Mark Zuckerberg for a spare billion because, West says, he's broke. He added and remixed tracks till he finally disgorged the two-years-in-the-making monster in the middle of the night in the middle of the weekend. In the hours afterward, West continued to tinker. Even that "performance" turned out to be from a not-quite-final version of the album. The rollout of "The Life of Pablo" has been impossible to ignore, climaxing with a listening party-fashion show-theater production Thursday at Madison Square Garden. West comes off as a man with hundreds of ideas in play all at once and no filter - a potentially lethal combination that has yielded some of the best music of the last decade. ![]() It's a mess, more a series of marketing opportunities in which West changed the album title and the track listing multiple times, to the point where the very thing that made West tolerable despite a penchant for tripping over his own ego - the music itself - became anti-climactic. Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo" (GOOD/Def Jam) sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished album.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |