Friday, June 21, 2013

Kanye West's Yeezus

What others say about Yeezus:



 

“Yeezus is the darkest, most extreme music Kanye has ever cooked up, an extravagantly abrasive album full of grinding electro, pummeling minimalist hip-hop, drone-y wooz and industrial gear-grind. Every mad genius has to make a record like this at least once in his career… Being a work of Kanye West, Yeezus is also a brilliant, obsessive-compulsive career auto-correct… This isn't just a way to stay ahead of the competition; it's a way to stay ahead of him.” – Jon Dolan / 4.5 Stars

 

 


 

"These are the immeasurably lofty stakes Kanye deals in on Yeezus...His intensity here has a heightened desperation as he howls into the void, but the Chicago native has always been beguiled by the view from above...Yeezus is something of a razor-sharpened take on 2008's distressed 808s & Heartbreak and marks a blunt break with the filigreed maximalism Kanye so thoroughly nailed on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy...For Kanye, there's purpose in repulsion. And on Yeezus, he trades out smooth soul and anthemic choruses for jarring electro, acid house, and industrial grind while delivering some of his most lewd and heart-crushing tales yet. This is willful provocation that Ice Cube, Madonna, and Trent Reznor could all be proud of...Kanye is unwilling or unable to settle for settling down. This discomfort is essential to Kanye's enduring appeal...cohesion and bold intent are at a premium on Yeezus, perhaps more than any other Kanye album. Each fluorescent strike of noise, incongruous tempo flip, and warped vocal is bolted into its right place across the record's fast 40 minutes. The precise approach runs through Yeezus' guerrilla-style promotion, too...the culture bomb’s flash was over in an instant, but the reverberations were just starting to spread." – Ryan Dombal / 9.5 Best New Music

 

 


 

“Yeezus” is technically breathtaking…its many flashes are the sonic equivalent of interrogation lamps, not disco balls. “Yeezus” charges out of the gate, sometimes switching sounds and textures without bothering to maintain tempo, then jerking back into position and rattling forward. There’s very little fat. “Yeezus” is a fiercely edited, assaultive, and noisy work, concerned less with grandeur than with intensity. It doesn’t sound like anything else on the charts…“Yeezus” is ambitious, but it’s blessedly free of the longueurs that attend so many Great Albums. Twenty years from now, West’s previous records will remain important, but a new generation may first gravitate to the lean vibrancy of this one…“Yeezus” is his most satisfyingly narcissistic record…The new album is all id, and that makes it easier to trust… The album is so tonally unified that it comes across as one very long single—an extended thought.” – Sasha Frere-Jones

 


 

“Kanye West’s sixth solo album, “Yeezus,” starts with a long, vicious electronic zap…It’s an aggressive demand for attention…“Yeezus” arrives with all eyes and ears on Mr. West…Mr. West’s response to all that scrutiny is an album that stays as combative as its opening zap…the music hurls Mr. West’s rhymes like a catapult, an effect compounded by his vehement delivery…revitalizing the punk-minded electronica of industrial bands…the album is one long, efficient, inventive kick in the head.” – Jon Pareles

 


 

“Yeezus” is the most musically adventurous album West has ever released…Those looking for a progressive, assured and kaleidoscopic rap album… should pop it on at full volume and close your eyes…Musically, this exploration is fascinating. “Yeezus” is minimal but powerful.” – Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON POST: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/kanye-wests-yeezus--a-darker-more-twisted-fantasy/2013/06/17/a9df7eb6-d6d6-11e2-8cbe-1bcbee06f8f8_story.html

“Ominous, mesmerizing and of great consequence…“Yeezus” is churlish and peculiarly magnetic….West is unquestionably doing whatever he wants here…it’s thrilling to watch the man discover new ways to stick out his neck…For all of the charred melodies and serrated rhythms on “Yeezus,” this is still luscious electronic music sculpted into elegant shapes that only signal threat…West’s music always keeps us thinking about the future. He’s a visionary who’s managed to tweak the serial rhythms that dictate so much of our pop culture diet. He doesn’t do cliffhangers. He jumps off…We gasp, gawk and wonder, ‘Where will he land?’” – Chris Richards

 


 

 

“An eclectic tour de force… Yeezus, is bizarre, brilliant, and like nothing you’ve heard before… It’s a sonically audacious, fascinating work of art… if Random Access Memories—a breezy ode to the funky ‘70s—goes down like a smooth daiquiri, Yeezus is like jungle juice… each track is imbued with its own thrillingly unique sonic identity, yet all ten tracks still flow together to form a cohesive whole. In an era of singles, this is an album, and must be listened to all the way through.” – Marlow Stern

 


 

 

“You have to hand it to Kanye — his self-belief has once again been almost completely backed up by his music. He’s long thought of himself as a creative pioneer and this is the largely unarguable proof. Brash and bombastic, “Yeezus” is essentially the sound of Kanye giving everybody the middle finger and more than anything else, it’s that confrontational attitude that makes it one of the best albums of 2013.” – Hardeep Phull

 


 

“An album that's punk in attitude, genius in execution… Everything about the album ups the ante of its advance press: It presents Kanye as nothing less than the Johnny Rotten of his generation… As tipped by its brilliant prerelease singles — “New Slaves” and “Black Skinhead” — the entire disc rethinks industrial rock of the early ’90s for both a new era and genre. The raw, dark and minimalist reliance on stabbing, bristling synths recalls a sound pioneered by acts like Ministry, Skinny Puppy and Nine Inch Nails… It’s a tighter album than most hip-hop works, clocking in at just 40 minutes. The terse length keeps its minimalist style from becoming dull. It’s just long enough to satisfy, but still short enough to make you want to play it over again right after you finish… It’s just the album it should be: a classic.”  - Jim Farber / perfect 5 Stars

 


 

“Nobody can say West didn't warn us. His new album, Yeezus is as dark and abrasive as the first two songs promised. It's also as daring and infectious as anything he's done, and demands to be heard with speakers on blast…a polarizing, multi-layered body of work that probably will be debated all summer. Who does that besides Kanye West?” – Steve Jones / perfect 4 Stars


 

“Kanye doesn't eat rappers, he consumes what rappers try to represent. Not to mention musical genres. And musicians. And sociocultural points of view. And the media's ability to micro-manage the conversation… Yeezus is a hip-hop album, not a rap album. Seemingly contradictory soundworlds and subject matter are selected and slapped together. The history of music is ransacked for very specific reasons, sampling and collapsing borders and creating movement forward out of the chaos… As for this being his "punk" or "post-punk" or "industrial" record, well, you can hear all that, if that's your life experience or critical orientation, but hip-hop has always been about noise and dissonance and dance music as agitation…Ultimately, like every Kanye album, Yeezus will be the most important record of the year.” – Charles Aaron, 8/10

 

“There’s almost too much to geek out over … West has been paying attention on our behalf…He inhabits the nucleus of the thing so that he can break it…it's West against the world, the martyr himself, Yeezus in the flesh, ready to represent the best and worst of us at once…Mix as many heavenly metaphors as you want — this is goddamned good art.” – Chris Martins, 10/10

 


 

Yes, Kanye West has gone rogue again. Did you expect anything less? The job of an innovator, of course, is to keep innovating… West's sixth solo effort plunges directly into the darker crevices of his psyche… Yeezus comes off as his hardest — designed, as the man himself says on ''Black Skinhead,'' to ''f--- up your whole afternoon.'' Believe it or not, that's just 'Ye being modest: This album has the potential to mess with your whole year…an album that reaches far outside of traditional sample-based hip-hop, unrepentantly stealing and mutating key elements of acid house, clanging industrial, and hard rock; house-of-horrors screams, synths, and squelches leap from the shadows.. even the most bombastic moments — the ones seemingly invented to bait the music blogs — underscore a man struggling to come to terms with his place in the world, in his own 'Ye way…he pushes the envelope aesthetically.” – Ray Rahman, A-

 

Watch out for “YEEZUS” album by Kanye West exclusively under MCA Music in cooperation with SMART, Live More! And LINE - a new communication app which allows you to make FREE voice calls and send FREE messages whenever and wherever you are, 24 hours a day!

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