Ye

Sure the heavenly feel of “No Mistakes” harkens back to his gospel soul days, 070 Shake’s passionate cameo on “Ghost Town” unveils a star-in-the-making and honest thoughts about raising North and Chicago on the serene album anchor “Violent Crimes” make for a alluring sonic experience. But ye merely excels in surface-scratching instead of the transcendent territories that spawned the Kanye everyone loved. Sometimes less does not equate to more.

For all its brevity, ye doesn’t feel slight. Substantially more focused than its predecessor, it packs a lot into 23 minutes. It is bold, risky, infuriating, compelling and a little exhausting: a vivid reflection of its author.

Ye is an album about Kanye’s state of mind, his family, and a narration of what’s been going on in his “shaky-ass year”. The beats are great. Lyrically, it’s fine. Whatever you think of his politics, his songwriting, sample-hunting and beat-making remain dynamic, surprising and ballsy.

Despite its sometimes grating protagonist, ye is a pleasant enough way to pass half an hour. Seven tracks is long enough to develop an idea without wearing it out. The production is typically lush. Kanye has returned to the kinds of soul samples that made him famous to begin with.

It’s a prismatic album, reflecting its creator’s entire body of work--and also whatever you think about him going in.

If anything, ye compresses the Kanye West character, making everything about the artist feel smaller, blurrier, like you are squinting at an image once larger than life.

Kanye’s eighth, deeply egotistical, candidly self-aware, frequently cringe-inducing, captivatingly produced and infuriatingly compelling record.

ye is by no means Kanye West’s finest moment, but it’s a reminder not to count him out just yet.

While Mr. West’s previous releases have made musical leaps, Ye often comes across as a recap.

The instrumentals on ye capture the essence of its marquee artist--the contradictions, the abrasive sudden shifts in tone, the blistering flaws and the bounty of positive potential. If West had better delved into his emotional and psychological turmoil in ye's lyrics, instead of getting bogged down with click-baity asides, then this LP would've been a classic.

Although not a masterpiece like My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, ye shares an abbreviated, yet complete look at Kanye, both the highs and the lows.

All told, Ye is thin gruel when placed next to Kanye’s intellectual transgressions, not to mention an impeccable oeuvre. As an aural experience, it offers a mix of triumph and nostalgia. Results will vary, depending on your willingness to embark on this very short, often thrilling, ride. But for an artist defined by grandiosity, Ye is frustratingly slight.

Not the outright disaster that some might have feared, but far from the return to form that might have helped heal his battered reputation, Ye sees the onetime innovator stuck in a holding pattern, too far gone to notice just how much the landscape has shifted beneath him.

ye is an average album with some good songs, some bad songs, and some songs that will clearly be spun millions of times. The problem is that "average" has never been good enough for Kanye West nor should it be.

For all his power as a motivating force it’s perhaps inevitable that Ye proves weakest of the first four. Left to his own devices West sounds bewildered, somewhere between awe and exhaustion. [Aug 2018, p.63]

Ye feels lyrically scatterbrained, as if its creator was unable to focus on anything for long enough to deliver a cohesive message.

Ye doesn’t feel like that reinvention. If anything, this album feels safe, a word I imagine is insulting to the artist. ... However, Kanye has an incredible ear for production, more apparent on Pusha T’s DAYTONA. There are some excellent moments on Ye, but with only twenty-four minutes of music, some doesn’t cut it.

While the depressive stuff is unsurprisingly disturbing--“I Thought About Killing You,” which opens Ye, evokes a school shooter’s nightmarish manifesto--West’s moments of euphoria prove no less vexing. ... This hymn-like ballad ["Violent Crimes"] built on churchy keyboards is so exquisitely rendered that, like much of Ye, it threatens to bring you over to his point of view.

Nobody can deny this mini album flirts with brilliance, and feels like a pop cultural moment straight out the gate; we just wish there was a little more to it.

Kanye West has always been a troll but there was once an empowering, heroic quality to his narcissism. As he struggles to find his footing in a strange new world, there is still merit in a work like Ye if you can somehow look past the self-destructive celebrity behind it.

Over a brief seven tracks, the 40-year-old superstar confirms his production prowess, veering between sparse, hyper-modern styles and compositions which hark back to the soulful bent of the producer-turned-rapper’s early career; a volatile mix of the sweet and the acrid, the sentimental and the tendentious.

We got a shockingly anodyne, non-political, briefly magnificent, half-finished piece of work.

Ye is an ambitious misfire.

Ye can feel uneven, sometimes boring, and more indulgent than usual, but it's a fascinating peek into West's psyche.

His verses mostly feel redundant, hastily thrown together to validate the presence of these songs on his project, and while the album has been described as introspective this very brief release only allows for skindeep thoughts on any one topic. The Kanye West show has already rolled on, but some of the magic of yesteryear has been left behind.

The Life of Pablo was chaotic, insecure, yet often brilliant. Ye is more chaotic, less secure, with enough sporadic flashes of brilliance to make you hungry for much, much more. It could have been worse.

Over seven songs spanning 24 minutes, “Ye” is immediately disturbing (“I Thought About Killing You”), slightly exhilarating (“Yikes”), bafflingly underwhelming (“All Mine,” “Wouldn’t Leave,” and “No Mistakes”), and fleetingly brilliant (“Ghost Town”). The one thing it’s not is coherent.

Make no mistake, this is difficult to listen to. You will not be rewarded for multiple listens. It is what it is. It’s not enough, by a mile. West has clearly made this for himself first, and indulgence is deeply ingrained into the concept.

About half the album has West as a role player on tracks that suggest a theater scene, with a handful of voices playing characters (quite possibly all living inside West’s brain). The album moves from spoken-word monologues to more expansive musical settings that try to “take the top off (and) let the sun come in.”

This disconnect between intent and delivery is explicit the entire album through. From the harried, unfinished-sounding "No Mistakes" which is built on a skeletal Slick Rick sample and almost nothing else, to the choppy breaks for chorus in "All Mine", to "Wouldn't Leave" which is basically a Francis and the Lights demo with a Kanye scratch vocal quickly added in.

Ye‘s emotional claustrophobia is at times effective: As a chronicle of living with mental illness, this is Kanye’s most unsparing work to date. ... But Ye just feels unfinished, as if he wanted to avoid another debacle like the rollout of the also-unfinished The Life of Pablo and turned in a rough draft to make deadline. Unlike Pusha’s Daytona, which is all muscle and sinew, Ye feels like a mix of the weakest moments from The Life of Pablo.

ye doesn’t reward repeat listens. It gives its limited treasures upfront and it’s an album with precious little beneath the surface.