A slight pitch correction could have done the trick. This noble failure of an album might easily have been a noble success if he had tweaked the Fun-o-Meter just a bit. Kanye the Songbird has forgotten the lesson that Kanye the Rapper taught his listeners: Heartbreak is not incompatible with wit, or with sharply drawn details, or with a buoyant beat. But in his most touching songs - “Through the Wire,” “Family Business,” “Hey Mama” - he tucked his confessions in between boasts and jokes. there is no Louis Vuitton I could put on. “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/And all I could show him was pictures of my cribs.” The low point is the freestyle “Pinocchio Story,” recorded live in Singapore, which finds Kanye bellowing, “There is no Gucci I could buy. Many of his best songs have focused on his ambivalence about materialism, but on 808s & Heartbreak, the theme has hardened into schtick. Like many sad sacks, Kanye likes the sound of his own whimper, and mistakes sentiments such as “I could never seem to find what real love was about” for profundities. In “Bad News,” Kanye’s digitized vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he’s become less than human. T-Pain taught the world that Auto-Tune doesn’t just sharpen flat notes: It’s a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness, and upping the pathos. Kanye can’t really sing in the classic sense, but he’s not trying to. The hit “Love Lockdown” is powered by thundering tribal drums and vocals that slide from digitized trills into strangled squeals. In “Street Lights,” a haze of distortion floats above tolling keyboard chords and a hammering beat. Kanye constructed the songs using a classic Roland TR-808 drum machine, and the results are a pleasant shock: stark, spacey tracks, which owe far more to Eighties electro and synth pop than anything on hip-hop radio. But here, the drear never lifts, and he never stops wallowing. Featured peformers: Kanye West (vocals, writer, producer, executive producer), Jeff Bhasker (keyboards), Andrew Dawson (recording engineer), Christian Mochizuki.
Rated 29 in the best albums of 2008, and 3724 of all-time album. Genres: Electropop, Synthpop, Contemporary R&B. Released 24 November 2008 on Roc-A-Fella (catalog no. How could you be so heartless?” he sings in “Heartless.” Kanye has often chosen introspection and self-exposure to the usual gangsta posturing. 808s & Heartbreak, an Album by Kanye West. “The coldest story ever told/Somewhere far along this road he lost his soul. But aside from one bleak song written for his mom (“Coldest Winter”), 808s & Heartbreak is a breakup album - it’s Kanye’s would-be Here, My Dear or Blood on the Tracks, a mournful song-suite that swings violently between self-pity and self-loathing. The record arrives in the wake of a year in which Kanye lost his mother and split with his fiancée, designer Alexis Phifer.
#808S AND HEARTBREAK REVIEW SERIES#
Recorded in a quick 3 weeks after a series of intense emotional stress and trauma for Kanye, 808s is a complete turn around from his previous work. A bold, fascinating, foolhardy, occasionally unlistenable Kanye West record was inevitable, with or without the cyborg-soul software. 808s and Heartbreak is the sound of a man falling apart at the seams.
But Auto-Tune isn’t totally to blame for 808s & Heartbreak. With Kanye largely abandoning rapping in favor of digitally altered crooning, his fourth album represents a cultural high-water mark for Auto-Tune, that now ubiquitous pitch-correction technology. Otherwise, no matter its commendable fearlessness, the album is a listless, bleary trudge along West's permafrost.Kanye West announced long ago that mere hip-hop superstardom was not enough for him - he wanted to be “the number one artist in the world.” So it’s no surprise that his untrammeled egotism has led him well beyond the usual limits of his genre. ("Coldest Winter," where West longs for his departed mother, samples the most desolate song from the first Tears for Fears album.) For anyone sifting through a broken relationship and self-letdown, this could all be therapeutic. Several tracks have almost as much in common with irrefutably bleak post-punk albums, such as New Order's Movement and the Cure's Pornography, as contemporary rap and R&B. All the blocky drums, dragging strings, droning synths, and joyless pianos lead to a bleak set of productions - even the synthetic calliope in "Heartless" is unnerved, and the relative pep of "Paranoid" provides no respite, its bitter lyrics subverting a boisterous beat.
girl." Earlier in the album, the number she did on him is called "the coldest story ever told," yet he admits he still fantasizes about her. The majority of the lyrics, however, are directed at an ex who evidently did some damage in "RoboCop" alone, she gets compared to the antagonist in Misery and is called a "spoiled little L.A. When, in "Welcome to Heartbreak," he dispassionately recounts sitting alone on a flight, ahead of a laughing family, he makes first class sound like Siberia he'd swap lives with the father in an instant. In various spots across 808s & Heartbreak, the constant flutter of West's processed voice, along with a seldom interrupted sluggish march of aching sounds, is enlivened by the disarming manner in which despair and dejection are conveyed.
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