Cruel Summer Review

Mercy is the reason this exists and it still works: a dub plate loop, four verses that each shift the ground under them, and a final section that changes the air pressure of the whole song. Clique is a flex built to be shouted back. New God Flow hands Pusha T a stage he uses better than anyone else on the record. Cold arrives with a grudge and a drum nobody has improved on since.

Four singles, four different ideas of what a hit sounds like in 2012, and all four hold. Then the album has to be an album. The Morning stacks six rappers on a mood piece and forgets to write a song underneath them. Sin City and Bliss give the back half to the singers and the energy leaves the building. Higher has a good idea and abandons it by the second verse.

Critics at the time praised the singles and the sheer excess of the thing and were plain that it never coheres as a record, and that reading is correct. Production is the strongest argument here by a distance, which is why it grades above the whole: Hit-Boy, Hudson Mohawke, Mike Dean and West himself make even the filler sound expensive. What is missing is any reason for these twelve tracks to sit in one place other than a release schedule. Play the four singles. The rest is a label meeting with a budget.