Yeezus Review

He wanted it to sound like a broken thing and he got there. Acid house screech, Chicago drill, Hungarian rock, a Nina Simone sample dropped into a track about lynching, and mixes so dry that reverb feels like a luxury he refused himself. On Sight opens with a synth like a dentist drill and then cuts to a children's choir for eight seconds, which is the whole method in miniature.

New Slaves and Blood on the Leaves are the peaks, and Bound 2 at the end is a joke that lands. The writing is often indefensible. There are lines here so crass and so lazy that they undercut the fury the music is generating, and the provocation curdles into a man saying whatever will get a reaction. It is also a record almost nobody puts on for pleasure, which is a fair charge against a forty minute album. But everything from the mixes to the arrangement choices got copied for a decade afterwards.