Above all else, you have to admire Kanye West’s ambitions - 808′s & Heartbreak doesn’t really sound anything like his past albums. There’s no more rapping, for starters, and he makes use of electronics in a way that few hip-hop artists have in the past.
Unfortunately, there also aren’t many good tunes here - at least not by his usual standards. In abandoning hip-hop and aiming for a poppier r&b quality (West has fought iTunes to have them list the album as “Pop” in their online store), West has gleefully rushed headfirst into a dozen tracks, with only a handful of them being good and the rest being uncharacteristically average. This isn’t as good as last year’s Graduation and, although one might be tempted to give him credit for this album based solely on the personal issues he’s experienced since then (namely, his mother’s unexpected death), that doesn’t serve as a justification for the album’s lesser moments.
The good songs - Paranoid, Robocop, Love Lockdown, Heartless, See You In My Nightmare, Street Lights - are all interesting on at least some level, and their flaws (because they do have flaws) are compelling enough to warrant repeat listens. And here’s the good news: I hated this album the first time I heard it. Now, over a week later, I like it. And maybe that’s the essence of 808′s - being a challenging, complex album with “growers” rather than immediate, catchy anthems (like last year’s Daft Punk-inspired Stronger) - but I find it hard to see the further appeal of the remaining songs, because they seem largely rushed - skeletons of good songs in search of stronger (no pun intended) structures.
This brings me to my final complaint, and something I blogged about last week: too much auto-tune! West presumably heard a few too many T-Pain tracks over the course of the past year and decided that the overused “tool” would benefit this record, but the album is saturated with it. When you’re making an album about subjects as tender as death and heartbreak, isn’t the entire point to sound as human as possible? The distorted vocals work on Robocop because, well, it’s a song about being machinistic. But imagine how better Amazing or Heartless would have sounded with honest, exposed vocals. Instead, they feel cold, calculated and distant - working against the topics of the songs themselves.
Admittedly, the more I listen to the songs, the more they develop an interesting continuity and style; I wasn’t impressed with Love Lockdown until I heard it placed within context on the album itself - and the mix of auto-tune with electronic elements and extended vocal-free outros is something distinctly unfamiliar. But this is hardly the Kid A of hip-hop that some journalists and music sites had begun hyping it as, and ultimately I’m left with a general feeling of indifference - which I’ve never experienced after listening to an album by West before.
Auto-tune can be an interesting tool if used accordingly, but one gets the impression of West having rushed into the studio like a kid with a new toy on Christmas, hellbent on employing its usage on every track - resulting in a few decent songs and a few growers but, ultimately, a curiously disaffected record from a man who has lost so much within the past year and who usually manages to communicate far more passionately through his music.
Rating: 
Bonus: You won’t find this on the album, but DJ Earworm has made a mash-up/remix of Love Lockdown and Radiohead’s Reckoner, which is quite fantastic and actually better than the version on the album. You can listen to it below, and find it available for download on the DJ’s website, located here.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iATyUqGlYE
