Yeezy season approaching.” This is how Kanye West opens “On Sight”, the first track of his soon-to-be-released sixth album, Yeezus. It doesn’t matter what kind of music you were hunting for before or after this moment, “fuck whatever y’all been hearing” right now, it’s Yeezy season. With a firestorm of glitches, drones, blips, and hissing percussion, Yeezy season does far more than just approach. It storms into your house, breaks your furniture, shatters your windows, eats all of your food, and steals your girlfriend for good measure.
It still baffles me that there are detractors to Kanye musically. He has done, with his five previous albums, more to shape the musical landscape of the millennium than anyone else. Armed with nothing but a genius ear, he has crafted masterpieces; hip-hop opuses with the complexity and skill of Mozart or Beethoven. His career trajectory is perfect; beginning with the simple, hair-raising pleasures of The College Dropout and moving at a natural pace until the culmination in 2010, with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Dark Fantasy, with it’s rich themes, obsessively and massively detailed production, and murderers-row of hip-hops greatest achievers and surprisers (looking at you, Justin Vernon), might very well be the greatest hip-hop album ever recorded. Dark Fantasy sits snugly at number four in my all-time-top-five favorite albums, so when this album was announced, I was rightfully skeptical. I mean, how do you top a masterpiece? As it turns out, with Yeezus, you don’t try.
I’m not going to talk about the arrogance of the album title, or the name, or the worldwide projections that proceeded this. The rest of this review is just pure music.
Yeezus is ‘Ye’s Kid A (say that five times fast). It’s an unnervingly simple, aggressive, it’s his leanest and most direct effort. “On Sight” and “I’m In It” are filled with aggressive, loosely weaved blips that invade the ear in strange, mind-realigning ways. “Black Skinhead” is a mesmerizing, pulsating track full of primal war-machine drums, gasps, and a guy saying “black”, over and over again for some reason (it works like a charm). “Blood on the Leaves” is a masterful cut up of one of TNGHT’s signature, horns-blaring tracks with a beautiful rendition of “Strange Fruit”. It proves Kanye is still one of the greatest producers around, with a track reminiscent of vintage Kanye, yet less dense, more direct, and infinitely more scary. Sounds on this track are scarce, but strong. Each track is built out of only a few elements, but those elements hit hard, with hypnotic aggression and repetition. When this album wants to be beautiful, too, it is. The last minute of “Guilt Trip” displays a beautiful soundscape of glitches and orchestras, and the guitar breakdown at the end of “Hold My Liquor” is earth-shatteringly gorgeous.
Now on to Kanye himself. This album is a showcase for how much he has improved as an MC. Since collaborations are few and far in between on this album, it’s mostly just his own mic work, and it works perfect. His flows are slicker, and his delivery is angrier than ever (the one line most people will be talking about comes from the grandiose house track “I Am a God”, Kanye becomes a petulant child at a bistro; “Hurry up with my damn croissants!”). The onslaught of the production could only work with an equally commanding MC at the forefront, and Kanye is just that.
If you’re looking for something easy, big, beautiful, vintage, or immediate, all power to you, but you haven’t come to the right place. However, if what you seek is something different, something new, something potent, look no further, my friends. All I know is that the first think I want to do after “Bound 2” abruptly starts is listen to it all over again. Yeezus H. Christ is this good.