For no real reason other than I guess the fact that he felt he had to put an album out, Ye was cobbled together in a month. And it shows quite plainly. As much as I praised the Ye-produced DAYTONA for making a fully formed album out of a mere 20-odd minutes, here Ye sounds like an odds-n-sods compilation - it literally sounds like a snapshop of a month in the studio with Kanye. Look, I have a lot of time for Kanye('s music). Yeezus is one of the best hip hop albums ever, to say nothing of the classics that preceded it. Obviously most people look at Yeezus as the dividing line between New Kanye and Old Kanye, but I still love it. The Life of Pablo was a little more dicey - it was slipshod, haphazard, scattered, bloated. I was hoping with this new 7-song limit we'd get back to Yeezus-style tightness. Not so much. You can count the good things on this album on one hand - the hooks on "Yikes" and "All Mine", "Ghost Town" which sounds like the only fully-formed track on this album, and 070 Shake's two appearances (on "Ghost Town" and "Violent Crimes"). Opener "I Thought About Killing You" flirts with Yeezus-style avantgardery although it's just not very interesting and takes two minutes to get going, then promptly ends. "Wouldn't Leave" and "No Mistakes" are entirely forgettable. The aforementioned "Violent Crimes" I could take or leave - the 070 Shake hook is nice, and it's a good tune, although Kanye's lyrics about being afraid his daughter will grow up hot are embarrassing. Which is another point against the album - Kanye's lyrics have undeniably been in decline from Yeezus onward, and they're similarly bottom-barrel here. Like the rest of the album, they're the result of Kanye simply not giving fuck. He can say whatever, do whatever, write whatever, and his celebrity status remains unimpeachable and he'll still shift a gazillion units (streams?). Oh well. I thought maybe after his breakdown and treatment we'd get something with a little more soul, heart, and thought. Not Ye, not yet.
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