Kanye West - 808s & Heartbreak (808's And Heartbreak - Kanye West)

Member Name: DavidJay

Product:	808's And Heartbreak - Kanye West
Date:	01/12/08 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gorgeous, retro production, memorable songs.

Disadvantages: Lyrically weak, and anyone with an aversion to vocoder best stay away.

808s & Heartbreak, hip-hop maverick Kanye West's fourth studio album is, it's fair to say, a curious affair all round. Abandoning (momentarily at least) the politically astute, rapid-fire, hook-heavy rap that made his name, the record consists almost entirely of bleak, icy, vocoder-slathered R&B ballads, most concerned in some way with loss, stagnation, loneliness and death, metaphorical or literal.

The opening Say You Will provides the blueprint for much of what follows, delivering on the sonic and thematic promises of the album title - beats pulled from a Roland TR-808 drum machine ping-ponging around a sparse, almost minimalist reflection on a sundered romance.

Only the most delicate piano line and the flimsiest sheet of choral synth compliment the frail beat and West's voice (more on the voice in a moment). It brings to mind no recent hip-hop record, not even a Kanye West hip-hop record, but rather conjures the ghost of Sinead O'Connor's masterful version of Nothing Compares 2 U. Like that record, this seems to straddle the shoulders of ghosts, and just as O'Connor filtered Prince's anguished lament through her own grief about the loss of her mother, so West wrestles with the loss of his mother and the break-down of a recent engagement.

As stated above, 808s & Heartbreak takes vocoder-usage to near-masochistic levels. Never a pretty sound at the best of times, the idea of an album's-worth of it is enough to have most sane and just-minded folks screaming themselves hoarse for a month.

Here, though, it works. Just. The mechanical, not-quite-human quality it lends to West's voice makes perfect sense in context, and juxtaposes nicely with the achingly, well, HUMAN content of the lyrics.

Despite the overwhelming joylessness of the thing thematically, though, 808s & Heartbreak is rarely depressing, and, on at least a couple of tracks, it is as giddying and energising as anything West has put his name to hitherto. The glorious Paranoid, for example, built around a maddeningly catchy retro synth hook, is, regardless of the lyrical woes, ridiculously good fun. It's one of the finest pop songs West has ever crafted, and provides a welcome counter to the sad-eyed lamentation haunting the rest of the album.

Similarly striking is Coldest Winter, a ballad punctured by intermittent bursts of deranged, distorted beats which themselves sound a bit like Machine Gun from the last Portishead record.

If there's a flaw in the album, it's in the lyrics. One will search long and, it must be said, to no avail, for anything of the class of, say, Jesus Walks, Heard Em Say or Diamonds From Sierra Leone. That said, there's nothing embarrassing - except for the occasions when the whole thing gets bogged down in nauseating lonely-at-the-top celebrity-woe garbage. It's just... colourless. Fitting, perhaps, given the enforced monochrome feel of the thing, but still a touch disappointing.

Critics have taken to the album with much more zeal than have West's fan-base, many of whom have been lambasting the overwhelming, well, slushiness of most tracks herein on the blogs and the forums since the first few notes were leaked months ago. Look beyond that, however, and one finds a brave, exciting, surprising piece of work, one that is by no means uncommercial, but which is nonetheless a risky move for an artist as high-profile as Kanye West.

A hip-hop superstar releasing an album of virtually rap-less ballads that sound like they fell from the back of a Soft Cell record sometime in 1986 - granted, 808s & Heartbreaks is perhaps, given the current thirst for all things even halfways eighties, not as odd a career-move as you might think, but it is, in the wider context of West's work, a hell of a curveball. It would be intriguing for that reason alone even if it were rubbish. Which it's not. By any stretch of the imagination.

Summary: A strange record sure to infuriate as many as it delights. I'm in the "delighted" camp.