It's hard to believe it has been a little over two years since Yeezus was released and the Kanye West fanbase was split for the second time (808's had a very similar effect), and to tell you the truth, I was on the side of the people saying that Yeezus was... meh. To me, it sounded like a watered-down "experimental" album that was only experimental if you only listen to mainstream music and, well, Kanye West. And to further my point, Yeezus is the only Kanye album that I think gets worse with each revisit. Even tracks that I thought were pretty good ("Black Skinhead") are entirely passable to me now. To put it bluntly, I needed to see Kanye either push forward with his sound, or go back to what he does best, and with his latest, The Life Of Pablo, we get a bit of both.
Now I'm not going to run through all the various titles that this LP has had in the past few months or even the multiple TRACKLISTS... instead, I'm evaluating this project on the merits of what we were given, in the way we were given it. And, for the most part, it's pretty darn good!
In fact, the early portions of this album are absolutely fantastic. The opener "Ultralight Beam" is incredibly soulful and features a verse from one of my personal favorite ChiTown MC's, Chance The Rapper, who absolutely kills his feature. This is followed by the two part "Father, Stretch My Hands" and the controversial "Famous" which has been getting a lot of buzz for it's line about Taylor Swift...*shrug*... I couldn't care less, but at least the song is great with a nice banger beat and a really nice feature from Rihanna singing a Nina Simone song.
The next few tracks are where the album kind of loses some steam for me. I do like the track "Feedback" and "Lowlights" has a decent beat, but honestly, the tracks in this middle section are all pretty short and tend to bleed together, but not because they are cohesive.
After this slight deadzone, we get the track "Freestyle 4" which is the only remnant of Yeezus that seems to have survived, and it's pretty good for the most part. But the album really hits a nice stride after the interlude "I Love Kanye" with tracks like "FML", "Real Friends", and "Wolves". Especially "Real Friends" which dropped a couple of weeks before the album release and seemed to signal a change in the way Kanye was going to be portraying himself on this album.
After "Wolves" the album goes into what are in some parts of the internet to be the "bonus" songs, though only three of these tracks are actually worthy of being bonus material. Obviously the track "No More Parties In L.A" is fantastic; it has a great verse from Kendrick Lamar, and Kanye sounds hungrier than he has in nearly half a decade. "30 Hours" is good too, but it goes on a little too long, and the closer "Fade" is really catchy, and manages to make Post Malone bearable!
Phew... So, in the end, I think Ye came through pretty well on this album, it isn't the greatest thing I've ever heard, in fact it could have used a slight revision to nix some of the more forgettable short tracks, but the truth is, I haven't enjoyed listening to a Kanye in full for about 5 years and the fact that I can say that about Ye in a post Yeezus world says a lot about how great this album can be.
8.3/10
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