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Sep 3, 2021Though this isn’t a complete comeback, frustrated Kanye fans certainly have more grounds for optimism after this record than they did before it.
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Sep 2, 2021Donda isn't without its highlights, but taken as a whole, it's both confused and confusing.
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Sep 2, 2021It's in the middle where the album begins to sag, thanks to some monotonous backings and noticeably weaker hooks ('Remote Control'/'Tell the Vision') which lead the runtime to become alarmingly apparent, before strong features on 'Keep My Spirit Alive', 'Moon' and 'Pure Souls' further begin to force Kanye awkwardly into the background on his own album. He positions himself closer to the spotlight towards the final third.
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Aug 31, 2021Kanye’s tenth album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.
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Aug 30, 2021It's not Kanye's return to form, but it does enough to stave off the kind musical irrelevance that seemed to be creeping up on him as his detestable personal misconduct began to dwarf his poor-to-middling studio output.
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Aug 29, 2021He is, it is true, a singular talent and his inner monologues crackle with an undeniable dark alchemy. And yet, like a sermon that goes on too long, Kanye’s stream-of-conscience observations on Jesus, Kim Kardashian and the importance of being Kanye suffer for an absence of breathing space. Full of sound and fury it may be – but West’s latest ultimately lacks direction.
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Aug 29, 2021While DONDA certainly isn’t a rushed job, it could have benefitted from West spending a little less time on it and learning when to let things go. Nobody needs all 27 of these tracks, but dig deep into its contents and you’ll find enough gems to make his 10th album worth your time.
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Aug 31, 2021As a Kanye West album, it feels more like a stabilization than an innovation. ... [The album] is sonically cohesive but also overlong and full of heavily assembled songs — multiple producers and writers, a bounty of male guests. West has long been shifting into conductor mode, and on several songs here, he is the ballast but not the focus.
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Aug 30, 2021If you decide to dive into the feature-film length collection of songs, you’ll find West firmly in the sonic palette of his post-TLOP run. There are messy, antagonistic productions akin that extend the Yeezus formula of pummeling listeners into submission. ... There’s a rare moment of humility in “24″, where West sings – shouts really – “we gon’ be okay” alongside a choir and over a discordant organ playing for an imagined too-hot summertime congregation. It’s as close to sublime as the messy, deeply flawed Donda gets.
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Aug 31, 2021More than half of this album is complete filler. No one’s missing “Okok,” “24,” or “Remote Control.” A soulful choir is not enough to save “Never Again.” On this record, there is none of the production genius we’ve come to expect from West. ... And that’s the thing that’s missing most from this record, with all its myriad problems: No one edits West anymore, not even himself. And that’s a damn shame.
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Sep 1, 2021Donda occasionally gestures toward the truly shapeless writing on that LP [Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red] but stops short of sounding as if West is truly articulating his id.
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Aug 31, 2021The album feels slapdash — a messy collection of stray thoughts about his mother, about divorce, about God, about the bipolar disorder he’s referred to as his superpower. ... The stylistic range is impressive but exhausting in a way distinct from 2016’s “The Life of Pablo”; this album lacks a sense of momentum to push you from the arena-rock guitar squall of “Jail” to the throbbing club beat of “God Breathed” to the dense choral vocals of “24,” which means nothing builds on anything else. West’s rapping is similarly scattershot.
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Aug 30, 2021The harsh fact is that the best verses on Donda don’t come from Kanye.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2,070 out of 3155
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Mixed: 161 out of 3155
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Negative: 924 out of 3155
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Jul 23, 2021
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Aug 29, 2021
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Aug 29, 2021