Album Review

Every artist worth his or her salt seems to endure a dark night of the soul period and respond to it with a piece of work that reveals this phase to the world. The trick is to make that material, no matter how personal it may be, resonate with the audience in a way that makes it just as much about them as it is about the artists themselves.

In the past year, Kanye West has suffered through the sudden death of his mother and the end of an engagement. Most of us wouldn’t have to share these very personal matters with the world at large. But West, whose brainy hip-hop has been justly celebrated even as his boastful and unapologetic public persona polarizes, is not the type to shrink away from the public until the wounds begin to heal. On the contrary, his new album 808’s & Heartbreak exposes those wounds for all the world to hear.

And, lest you think he’s not serious, he does it without the built-in defense mechanisms of his patented, pop-culture-savvy rhyming. For the most part, 808’s & Heartbreak eschews hip-hop. West instead gets his point across via a somewhat odd but at-times inspired method: singing with his voice altered through the studio trickery known as Auto-tune.

This seems counterintuitive at first; using a computer to correct vocal flaws should work against the kind of emoting that such personal material would seem to demand. But West realizes that his melodies are much stronger than his singing voice, and the robotic quality of the vocals embellishes the themes of alienation and loneliness.

As you might surmise from the album’s title, the other defining characteristic is a Roland TR-808 drum machine. Again, it lends itself to a more mechanized sound against which West’s anguished, semi-distorted vocals play. The beats are usually spare and stay out of the way, but when they do rev up into a frenzy, like the drumline-on-amphetamines ruckus raised by first single “Love Lockdown,” the effect is powerful, especially considering the rest of the song is distinguished by a squirmy, four-note bass line and Kanye’s naked vocals.

Songs like “Love Lockdown” and “Say You Will” build up palpable tension, with West going to fascinatingly dark lyrical corners that explore sexual obsession and jealousy. On “Love Lockdown,” he struggles with preserving his own identity while satisfying the needs of his mate: “I can’t keep myself and keep you too.” “Say You Will” sets some synth bleeps against disembodied vocals that sound borrowed from the 70’s hit “I’m Not In Love,” and it makes for an intoxicating sound.

Problems arise when it becomes apparent that variety is in short supply throughout the album. Musically, additional touches like the Prince-ly synths of “Paranoid” or the sprightly orchestral flourish of “Robocop” could have made this album more complete. The latter song also lets Kane show off some of his playfulness and humor that bring a much-needed respite from all of the raw emotions on display.

West’s biggest problem is that he seems at a loss at how to express himself in the confines of a melody-based song. Without the room to come at his topic from all angles, as he could using his elaborate raps, he sinks back to clichés and simplistic rhymes. Songs like “Bad News” and “Heartless” get caught in a lyrical and musical rut from which they can’t recover. On “See You In My Nightmares,” Lil Wayne shows up for a mewling rap, but it’s in the service of another one-sided downer. When West resorts to “life’s just not fair” on “Street Lights,” he hits a lyrical nadir that his hip-hop lyrics never approach.

On the ironically boastful “Amazing,” West drones in an ominously low voice which seems, aided by Auto-tune, to scrape the bottom of Hell: “I’m the only one I’m afraid of.” This brief moment of self-examination is more revelatory than all of the easy life’s-too-short, fame-is-a-bitch observations that inhabit the rest of the record. West deserves credit for trying something so startlingly new and nailing this approach on several songs. But too often on 808’s & Heartbreak, his dark night of the soul, like a voice corrected by Auto-tune, sounds dehumanized.