Donda Review

Somewhere in this is the record about his mother he had been circling since 2007. Jail is two chords, a distorted organ and a guest verse that does more work in sixteen bars than most of the album manages in an hour. Hurricane has the best vocal any singer has given him in a decade. Off the Grid is four minutes of a Brooklyn drill rapper simply outrunning everyone on the track.

Moon and Jesus Lord are patient in a way he had stopped being. The problem is that these are spread across twenty seven tracks and a hundred and eight minutes, with alternate versions appended, with a stadium rollout that treated the album as an event rather than a thing to finish, and with writing that keeps reaching for scripture when it cannot find a line. Cut in half this would sit near the top of his second act. At full length it is an endurance test most people have never played twice.