“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
THE NEW YORKER: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2013/06/24/130624crmu_music_frerejones?mobify=0
“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
NEW
YORK TIMES: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/arts/music/yeezus-kanye-wests-raw-and-jolting-new-album.html?_r=0
“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
LOS
ANGELES TIMES: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-review-kanye-wests-wildly-experimental-narcissistic-yeezus-20130617,0,3686173.story
“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
NEWSWEEK/DAILY
BEAST: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/15/praise-yeezus-kanye-west-s-latest-album-is-an-eclectic-tour-de-force.html
“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
NEW
YORK DAILY NEWS: http://www.nydailynews.com/five-star-review-kanye-west-yeezus-rocks-raps-article-1.1373220
“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-
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