'ye' album review: Kanye West flew too close to the sun, then directly into it

Kanye may have set himself an impossible task trying to redeem himself through music from the past year's shenanigans, but with this new album it's like he didn't even try

★★☆☆☆

Kanye West has made a career out of proving people wrong. With his debut album, The College Dropout, he demonstrated that you don't need to wear a jersey and a bucket hat or have grown up selling drugs to be a rapper, paving the way for a new class of hip-hop artists. With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he earned redemption with a nation that at the time largely viewed him as a "jackass" - to quote Obama - following the Taylor Swift VMAs debacle, creating one of the very finest albums of this millennium (and past millennia for that matter).

So the past year's contrarian statements, erratic and contradictory behaviour, trolling singles, alternatingly insightful and embarrassing "free thinking", and general public unravelling all had to be building to a virtuosic, paradigm-shifting rebuke of an album release, right? If not a disguised lead-up to a performance art reveal then at least a controversy from which to bounce back from, right? Wrong.

Look, I don't care that Kanye West wore a MAGA hat. I don't actually think he is a Trump supporter, or even a Republican for that matter, and was simply being provocative and admiring unorthodoxy without bothering to do any research into his new icon's odious policies, but so what? It was an arrogant and ill-conceived stunt, but - and I may be in the minority here these days - I don't expect or want all artists and art to have the same sociopolitical stance, a modern demand that comes from the Internet Left but feels positively right-wing and authoritarian. As such, I can provide you with an actual honest review of this album that isn't predisposed to hate it just because some celebrity social media thought leader has declared Kanye West "cancelled". Sadly, I can't provide you with a positive one.

The artwork for ye, the eighth album in Kanye's discography and a blight on it, was shot by West on his iPhone on the way to the album's listening/launch party, which is kind of cool. The songs on ye were also completed the same day, which is not. There are only seven of them, totalling less than 24 minutes back-to-back, and they were recorded in a hurry in Wyoming with help from a cadre of big-name collaborators who can probably be credited with saving this release from total failure.

ye, decapitalised I assume to manage expectations, actually starts off pretty strong. "I Thought About Killing You" has shades of the Kanye genius of yore, showing the instinctive command of melody of a musical aesthete who builds momentum in a song like no other. Lyrically moving, if verging on overly morbid as he fantasises about killing himself, it has an incredibly addictive beat switch in the second half which sucks the breath out of your lungs, completely shifting the song to a different plane. For a minute, in this sonic pocket the switch creates, you feel you can glimpse the state of unconfined creativity and nakedness of thought that Kanye has been striving and campaigning for. It's a thrill, and Kanye's flow, switching from on to off the beat, provides woodpecker levels of head nodding for the listener.

Track two, "Yikes", is a competent pop song that could have sit comfortably on The Life of Pablo. As Kanye rants about his experiences with prescription and recreational drugs, it's fascinating in the same way the album Red Hot Chili Peppers' guitarist John Frusciante made (and since retracted) just to get money for heroin is, a self-portrait of someone at the end of their rope. It's not insightful or poetic about the intersection of drugs and mental health though, and the outro in which Kanye declares his apparent bipolar disorder his "superpower" feels like something out of a sappy, heartwarming segment on Ellen.

"All Mine" follows, which has an irresistible bounce to it, but Jeremih's snakecharmer-esque hook is plain irritating and lyrically Kanye stamps well-trodden lyrical ground. "I could have Naomi Campbell, and still might want me a Stormy Daniels" he raps - just an alternate to his "See I could have me a good girl, and still be addicted to them hood rats" line on MBDTF's "Runaway".

From here, the album goes completely off the rails. "Wouldn't Leave" chronicles the strain Kanye's recent behaviour put on his marriage and pays tribute to "every damn female that stuck with they dude [when he's been an inconsiderate, unthinking asshole]". It's downright bizarre, and almost as embarrassing as that time Robin Thicke made a whole album in apology to his estranged wife.

"No Mistakes" is barely even a song, two minutes and three seconds spent with a lacklustre chorus and half-assed verse, and "Violent Crimes" strains to be an epic closer to an album we only started 21 minutes ago, musically a regression to Kanye's Late Registration days.

Between the two tracks is "Ghost Town", the only other remotely good song on ye along with "Today I Thought About Killing You" and "Yikes", which new GOOD Music signee 070 Shake manages to salvage with a stunning, anthemic and sincere vocal over a crunchy guitar riff. I hope it gives her a platform - hell, with humiliation abound somebody needs to benefit from this album!

"I've been tryin' to make you love me," Kid Cudi drawls like in a bad bro country song, "But everything I try just takes you further from me." It's a clear plea from Kanye but a false one: he's not even trying.

And that's the real problem with ye, it's lazy. Kanye West's perfectionism and work ethic are probably the two things I admire most about him, but with this release they are curiously absent. Maybe he's struggling with his mood worse than ever before right now and I sincerely hope he's okay and doesn't resort to some of the methods of escape he flirts with on this album. But I've always seen him as a high-functioning depressive, a hero for me in this regard given my own experiences with mental health, a guy who had perfected the alchemy of turning pain into art.

Perhaps if Kanye had simply called ye an EP or a mixtape it would have been passable, a fun little project, but as a 'studio album' it feels like a pointless exercise. Congratulations on managing to make a satisfactory album in just a few weeks, I guess? We expect more than that more from Kanye, though what's really puzzling is that I would have thought he expects more from himself.