Feb. 15--Kanye West's "The Life of Pablo" (GOOD/Def Jam) sounds like a work in progress rather than a finished album. It's a mess, more a series of marketing opportunities in which West changed the album title and the track listing multiple times, to the point where the very thing that made West tolerable despite a penchant for tripping over his own ego -- the music itself -- became anti-climactic.
West comes off as a man with hundreds of ideas in play all at once and no filter -- a potentially lethal combination that has yielded some of the best music of the last decade. The rollout of "The Life of Pablo" has been impossible to ignore, climaxing with a listening party-fashion show-theater production Thursday at Madison Square Garden. Even that "performance" turned out to be from a not-quite-final version of the album. In the hours afterward, West continued to tinker. He added and remixed tracks till he finally disgorged the two-years-in-the-making monster in the middle of the night in the middle of the weekend. Meanwhile, he had quite a week on social media: defending Bill Cosby, dissing Taylor Swift (again) in an oft-quoted series of song lyrics, and begging Mark Zuckerberg for a spare billion because, West says, he's broke.
This is #SMH (shake my head) time in Kanye land, and now there's an ungainly 18-track, 58-minute album that may take months to fully decode. In a world that was ruled by hyper-speed hot takes of, well, everything, "The Life of Pablo" presents a particular challenge: Scattershot, dense, bewildering, frustrating, off-putting, impenetrable, and filled with throwaways. It's an album made by an artist whose personality has so overshadowed his art that finding the gems within all the psychodrama can exhaust all but the most dedicated fans.
With his previous album, "Yeezus" (2013), West tested his audience's allegiance like never before, with harsh, sometimes brutal music and often ugly lyrics. But that album at least felt like a complete work, in line with previous releases in which he would often appropriate subgenres of music and give them his own twist. Not so "The Life of Pablo."
West has called it a "gospel album," but that's not particularly helpful. Chance the Rapper, who was initially inspired by West and in turn served as one of the inspirations for "Pablo," makes gospel-informed hip-hop tracks steeped in the music of the South Side churches he attended since childhood. West's version of gospel touches on some of those sonic cues -- heavy organ, soaring choirs -- but seems more preoccupied with gospel text and the notion of redemption.
"Pablo" refers to the first century prophet Paul. In his previous life as "Saul," as described in the Bible, Paul killed or persecuted Christians until blinded by God's light on the road to Damascus. Afterward, he became one of the primary chroniclers of Jesus Christ's legacy. Coming from an artist who once posed on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a crown of thorns, such imagery shouldn't come as a complete surprise.
"This is a God dream," West announces on the opening "Ultralight Beam," but he's not exactly walking in Saul's sandals. This is a religious album, all right -- the religion of Kanye. That's not necessarily bad news because for several years, the best moments on West albums have been those in which he turns his brutal honesty inward. That's particularly true of "FML," in which he enlists the Weeknd to underline how he struggles to remain devoted in his marriage. Family also centers "Wolves," reworked considerably from its public debut last year. It sounds even more haunted with the wordless vocals of Caroline Shaw and an eerie coda from Frank Ocean.
In another track, West proclaims, "I hate the new Kanye, the bad mood Kanye. ... I miss the old Kanye," affirming one of his earlier strengths: an ability to laugh at himself. That same tongue-in-cheek sensibility re-emerges on "No More Parties in LA," with a snappy verse from Kendrick Lamar and bonus points for rhyming "spiritual" and "Cap'n Crunch cereal."
