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I’m sat here contemplating, how does one possibly create suspense for the glorious readers of PinBoard when 85% of the long-player in question has already (dubiously) dribbled onto your iPods via one cyber-faucet or another?

Now before you expect me to impetuously decimate the long-awaited work that I heard in full on Tuesday night at the plush, upstairs lounge above the commoner’s heads at Gaucho Grill (London’s 02 Centre) with Kanye seated in pole position; first I’m forced to halt and think weather or not our failure to fathom now will be us turning around in 10-15 years and hailing this as the man’s misunderstood magnum opus. I wonder, does Kanye West’s mutiny by means of vocoder herald Hip-Hop’s Dylan-gone-electric moment?

It has in fact taken me five days, repeat examination of a few leaks & compulsory attendance to Glow In The Dark just so I could evaluate with the gates of perception blown wider ajar; just so I could understand one of the most calculated and critically acclaimed minds in Black music during our generation. Do you deny he is that? Do I? Let us scrutinise…

Final Cover Art:

I love this. Minimalism with the grey denotes despondency and the empty space in which one is companionless. The solitary, deflated, red, heart-shaped balloon in the middle subverts a popular piece of romantic iconography whilst symbolising Kanye’s crestfallen condition (having lost both a dependable mother and an intimate lover). And if you look to the left, observe the vertical colour panel as each shade represents one of the eleven tracks on the disc; it’s tiny details like this that very few musicians nowadays in any genre are willing to be the vanguards of and intensifies my own admiration of what I’d consider a true artist. Homie gets an automatic point off the bat.

I’m gonna be sad the day cover art becomes a forgotten custom in our increasingly digitized concave. Sob sob. I might even go and make an album over the matter.

Track-By-Track:

1. ‘Say You Will’ 
We commence in sombre fashion with a plagued man pining over a possessive, choral backdrop, that seemingly resonates around the proverbial alter at which he’s been left to fantasize about some beguiling creature. The tone is set. I even sit there thinking I can relate as will many men, and that’s another one point in the communal bag isn’t it? Underpinning his burning desire is a prime example of famed 808 utility: an ostensive sub-frequency bass that emits tremors I can almost feel vibrating through my kneecap as it rests against the bar. There is also an advanced sense of composition here; amidst the haunted fog are stinging blips and bleeps as later the piece suddenly descends into an extensive bridge to carry itself with wandering isolation. Yet, as the song draws to a close my colleague turns to me incited and says, “I’d rather have heard the whole song like that without the robo-singing.” At which point, I couldn’t say I disagreed though 1 track in, conventions are already defenseless to being right, royally shitted on.

2. Welcome To Heartbreak’ feat. Kid Cudi
This track pulsates with a sinister, silver-screen urgency. However the  drums don’t feel adhesive enough below the overlapping synthesiser and I feel the first sonic stumbling block of the album. I lost interest after the first 1 minute and 10 seconds and my notes, erm, dwindled. Apologies. Expect more low-spirited, celebrity alienation as he poignantly vomits from a materialistic stockpile, “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/ And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs.”

3. ‘Heartless’
The second single from 808s & Heartbreak. You’ve all rinsed this by now I’m sure and won’t be needing any Freudian deconstructive effort from me. The hook is undeniably infectious and I had a real quandary myself aswell as battling Speeakz (ethical-wrestling after hearing not one, but two vocoder’ed singles leak) whilst attempting to front on it (and failing).

4. ‘Amazing’ featuring Young Jeezy
My ear is finally bitten with a denture-crunch drum as the first warrior-stance of the LP is erected, “It’s amazing I’m the reason everybody’s riding this evening/ I’m exhausted barely breathing holding onto what I believe in/ No matter what you’ll never take that from me…” With another programmed choir on the hook at his despotic disposal, we’re roused with the more tolerable and least flamboyant application of auto-tune on the entire album. I’m far from a Young Jeezy enthusiast but it is a canny collaboration that will hold discernible appeal to the streets, strugglers and hustlers (a bulbous demographic ‘Ye isn’t untutored enough to forget whilst still hammering out the most civically-challenging effort of his career), even if it’s doesn’t fit the overall heartbroken homogeny of the set.

Continue reading after the jump

5. ‘Love Lockdown’
We now arrive back at the original axis of controversy. It’s also added testament to it’s makers unyielding perfectionism as we hear the re-mixed and re-mastered final version after 2 months of prototyping. With the 808’s heart-synched bass-kick EQ’d so overpoweringly, surely it reflects the palpitations of a torn lover, throbbing in agony and frustration with blood pumping in clots around his overwrought body? I feel Kanye needs us to share this part of him via a deliberately enhanced sensory experience whilst also illustrating mastery over his tools. With a booming tribal undercurrent throughout the LP (maybe something ancestral the composer feels so far removed from that he needs to re-administer such influence), never is it more so driven than the Taiko drums on this particular record. As the vehemently struck piano keys crescendo in a manner reminiscent to Nina Simone’s climax on ‘Sinnerman’ (the original break for his production of Talib Kweli’s ‘Get By’ with which certain characteristics are shared), a cacophony of cries and screams (that neither Speakz nor I remembered hearing with such alarm on prior versions) drags us into a carnival love-boat tunnel where only psychological demons dwell. If this is per chance a besotted subpoena to former-fiance Alexis Pheifer, then she has unequivocally been served

6. ‘Paranoid’ featuring Mr. Hudson (previously leaked as ‘Anything’ featuring Kid Cudi)
After the last five gloomy canvases, a playful paradox arises to completely shift the palette towards a cheeky 80’s pastiche. Thematically we stay in a sentimental fallacy though graduating more to the command of his relationship, “All of the time you wanna complain about the night’s alone/ So now you’re here with me show some gratitude/ Leave that attitude way back at home”. With frigid pounding and histrionic snares sounding direct from some retro Action Man commercial, a sing-along assisted Mr. Hudson hook (our dapper Brit champ) and campy synths have us venturing dangerously close to Ah-Ha territory. Viewed on paper, this song should falter under it’s umbrella and fall apart, but it’s obviously a strategic decision to accelerate the tempo at this juncture- and indeed- we need this welcomed break from black holes and brooding.

7. ‘Robocop’
The post-modernist nostalgia continues with a riled response to an over-protective, bi-polar squeeze developing on from the last track. “Just lookin’ at your history/ You’re like the girl from Misery” carps our caged protagonist in reference to obsessive-delusional Annie Wilkes from the infamous Stephen King thriller. When originally leaking in preliminary form, West admitted it was the uneven, euphonic wreck of the album though now post-treatment is noticeable with a vigorous reworking of it’s pounding synths and strings- reportedly by famed Jazz & keyboard experimentalist Herbie Hancock. It’s now grander with removal of tinnier overtones and pushing towards the planned Baroque dynamic to match the harmonium. Of course it’s all heavily conceptual stuff but at the heart of it you can’t help but feel ‘Ye only really just wants you to ‘crank dat Robocop’, whilst the industrial sound affects create a mechanoid nuance that’s self-deprecating considering the use of such processed vocals. I’d also brand this the most ambitious and furthermore dangerous piece on the LP, as it mixes such an alien cocktail that it’s as likely to titillate the unorthodox as it is to repulse the more puritanical sort.

8. ‘Street Lights’
Yeezy- stop- put that Killers ‘Hot Fuss’ compact disc the f**k down, it’s not your department. We’re now smeared with the soggiest stroke of a thus far, distinct, set of paintings. This illustrates a bland penchant for middle-of-the-road Soft Rock balladry, bar any zest a la the aforementioned band. I assume the aim was to create some festival fodder (ya know, for those cultured individuals who principally fancy ‘Guitar Music’ or something nearing it in inoffensiveness), but that simply transpires into snooze-inducing filler. Counterfeit Coldplay crescendos aside and tediously emo, “Life’s not fair” lyricism coupled with a flaccid vocal delivery make this a trite, forgettable number that will force me in future to either skip or have my skin crawled.

9. ‘Bad News’
At last, a smoothly executed and stirring track that benefits from an element one may argue the album lacks: a remote sense of restraint. Over a fluttering dancehall inspired drum pattern, Kanye injects a Prince/Camille role-reversal singing the first verse from a female perspective as she suffers the break-up blow. The vocal harmony aches through it’s disfiguring filter, “Didn’t you know I was waiting on you/ Waiting on a dream that’ll never come true,” and for the first time I begin to understand what the aspiration for such a device could have been. Also at this point in the function, our secondary host DJ Semtex backspun the record along with the room to a standstill as our primary host took to the microphone. Caught off guard in this unremarkable press-play-and-let-it-run session, I turned to my colleague nonplussed and asked, “Is that ‘Ye singin’?” as we were finally blessed and addressed by the maestro himself who went onto explain the concept behind the record. On reload, the song was allowed to drift into an emotive string section that coalesced so beautifully with the other elements in the beat, hairs were alerted to stand on the back of my neck.

10. ‘See You In My Nightmares’ featuring Lil’ Wayne
I’m not an adherent Lil’ Wayne zealot either, but ‘Barry Bonds’ had been one of the hardest highlights of ‘Graduation’ despite this latest collaborative foray initially taking guise as another debatable ’Drunk & Hot Girls’. Rigid synths ignite with a Dirty South cloud of radioactivity like a klaxon of doomsday sounding off to accompany Weezy’s strangled pipes and laments of repression, “I got the right to put up a fight/ But not quite because you put off my lights/ But my sight is better tonight/ And I might see you in my nightmares”, whilst Yeezy makes it abundantly clear, “Tell everyone that you know, That I don’t love you no more.” It appears the affair has come to an end, but then can love ever be killed without incurring the presence of ghosts?

11. ‘Coldest Winter’
We’re handed the final piece of his ribcage puzzle. Anti-romantic requiems now evolve on this final grieving note into a graveside eulogy for his late mother Donda West, who perised at the end of last year.  Some speculate her passing is the fundamental catalyst for Kanye’s emotional displacement with she as the pinnacle of his faith in the fruits of having a family- something made even less attainable with the loss of another woman he may have planned to forge his flesh & blood with. Over a stuttering snare and epic, theatrical thumping with bursts of car-radio-in-snowstorm static our forsaken idol adopts a Sting-like strain in pleading, ”Goodbye my friend/ Will I ever love again?” This is met with defeat in his closing confession, “Goodbye my friend/ I won’t ever love again.” Kanye West is in a very dark place, as now am I, the aural voyeur of his hurt.

During the ensuing Q&A session West admits he was attempting to “push the limitations” of a prominent piece of Hip-Hop hardware: the Roland TR-808 drum machine. Peering beyond the fact this was same apparatus Lil’ Jon was using to formulate scrotal-sweating, strip-club Crunk 5 years ago, it is a legendary piece of kit that when applied correctly (as in this case) can create a towering presence that turns a beat to a beast.

And it’s beasts that West is trying to raise. Beasts to fight his demons. By channeling personal anxieties into these renegade, grandiose compositions he pays homage to excess; the kind that compensates an abandoned spirit in the aftermath of loss. He is not quite the Hip-Hop heretic we’d readied the noose for, but more a fallen hero. Fallen by his own bosom that is- not by his ‘art’. The notion of ‘art’ is still something he emphasises heavily and believes in upholding.

Truthfully, it is self-indulgent and it is the mad scientist project. It’s Kanye West at his most Brian Eno, and it’s Hip-Hop at it’s most ‘Prog’, despite ‘Prog’ in Rock context having been associated with the kind of pomp and pretense that’s been lambasted for the last three decades so uproar was always imminent. Having said that, couldn’t some of this musical (and not always material) extravagance be more welcome in the presently stagnant state of mainstream Hip-Hop with it’s stumped growth and stereotypes? 

But then again, is Kanye even making Hip-Hop anymore? He openly embraced his commercial stature and appeal by declaring, “I am a Pop artist”, so does that make ‘808s & Heartbreak’ Pop music? Yes it does. Though not due to any cookie-cutter connotations, but because the themes of love, heartbreak and loss are universals that transcend beyond any limitations that lesser forms of Hip-Hop and narrow-minds can impose their sanctions on. The songwriting and melodies displayed on the album are of a Pop calibre as lines are harmonized with intent to enrapture and cause arenas and stadiums to join in: that’s the measure of a great Pop(ular) record.

I can smell your breathe against the screen now as I’m sure you want me to address the supposed sacrilege use of the Antares Auto-Tune. West did flippantly proclaim during the talk that he wished to “make auto-tune credible” quite simply because as felt as ‘Kanye the artist’ he could do as he pleased and we’d essentially submit to his taste-making adjudication for it. I’ll let his oversized Pastelle britches slide for a minute and look to the real creative decision behind the cyborg sing-a-longs. Allegedly the warped distortion of the vocal demonstrates confusion in the thick of heartbreak. Though when originally conceived, I quote West from another report stating the purpose of this album was to expose an   ”emotional nakedness”. Come on let’s be frank- facing the contradiction- wouldn’t it have been more powerful to utilise the natural, human voice than to cloak it’s organic pain with something explicitly artificial?  (Unfortunately, this is one of questions my colleague advised me not to ask him for fear of upsetting the guy.) However, far from being flawless I still think he can hold a note averagely well with a singing voice that has a warm tonal quality- when not too irksomely pitch bent.

Really there is only one gross problem with this piece. For all it’s electro-orchestral majesty, a crucial ingredient is absent and that is Soul. One of the most affecting songs in Kanye’s catalogue is ‘Roses’ and considering the lachrymose influences behind the current project, some attention should have been paid to distill the heart-string yanking strength of that past work and mainline that here.

Yet after great deliberation, I think this IS a brilliant album. That answer for which quite honestly lies between the cause for it and the sheer ambition to cure that.

Plus despite it being one of the most groundbreaking and indicative years of forthcoming shifts expected in our audio landscape, ‘808s & Heartbreak’ still stands as perhaps the most fascinating and provocative project of 2008. Because somewhere deep down even if you passionately oppose the vision, you just can’t deny the man’s ability to kick up a fuss that has us all embroiled with such divided opinion. And you can’t buy that level of attention in these times modern time, you can only make it.

Just like in his own sincere words, “this album is a ‘fuck you.’”

Words by Shan Phearon for PinBoard Blog.
Courtesy of http://ibootleggedyourmum.wordpress.com