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Oct 8, 2018ye is an average album with some good songs, some bad songs, and some songs that will clearly be spun millions of times. The problem is that "average" has never been good enough for Kanye West nor should it be.
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The WireJul 26, 2018For all his power as a motivating force it’s perhaps inevitable that Ye proves weakest of the first four. Left to his own devices West sounds bewildered, somewhere between awe and exhaustion. [Aug 2018, p.63]
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Jun 7, 2018Ye feels lyrically scatterbrained, as if its creator was unable to focus on anything for long enough to deliver a cohesive message.
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Jun 6, 2018Ye doesn’t feel like that reinvention. If anything, this album feels safe, a word I imagine is insulting to the artist. ... However, Kanye has an incredible ear for production, more apparent on Pusha T’s DAYTONA. There are some excellent moments on Ye, but with only twenty-four minutes of music, some doesn’t cut it.
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Jun 5, 2018While the depressive stuff is unsurprisingly disturbing--“I Thought About Killing You,” which opens Ye, evokes a school shooter’s nightmarish manifesto--West’s moments of euphoria prove no less vexing. ... This hymn-like ballad ["Violent Crimes"] built on churchy keyboards is so exquisitely rendered that, like much of Ye, it threatens to bring you over to his point of view.
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Jun 4, 2018Nobody can deny this mini album flirts with brilliance, and feels like a pop cultural moment straight out the gate; we just wish there was a little more to it.
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Jun 4, 2018Kanye West has always been a troll but there was once an empowering, heroic quality to his narcissism. As he struggles to find his footing in a strange new world, there is still merit in a work like Ye if you can somehow look past the self-destructive celebrity behind it.
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Jun 4, 2018Over a brief seven tracks, the 40-year-old superstar confirms his production prowess, veering between sparse, hyper-modern styles and compositions which hark back to the soulful bent of the producer-turned-rapper’s early career; a volatile mix of the sweet and the acrid, the sentimental and the tendentious.
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Jun 5, 2018We got a shockingly anodyne, non-political, briefly magnificent, half-finished piece of work.
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Jun 4, 2018Ye is an ambitious misfire.
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Jun 15, 2018Ye can feel uneven, sometimes boring, and more indulgent than usual, but it's a fascinating peek into West's psyche.
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Jun 12, 2018His verses mostly feel redundant, hastily thrown together to validate the presence of these songs on his project, and while the album has been described as introspective this very brief release only allows for skindeep thoughts on any one topic. The Kanye West show has already rolled on, but some of the magic of yesteryear has been left behind.
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Jun 5, 2018The Life of Pablo was chaotic, insecure, yet often brilliant. Ye is more chaotic, less secure, with enough sporadic flashes of brilliance to make you hungry for much, much more. It could have been worse.
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Jun 4, 2018Over seven songs spanning 24 minutes, “Ye” is immediately disturbing (“I Thought About Killing You”), slightly exhilarating (“Yikes”), bafflingly underwhelming (“All Mine,” “Wouldn’t Leave,” and “No Mistakes”), and fleetingly brilliant (“Ghost Town”). The one thing it’s not is coherent.
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Jun 1, 2018Make no mistake, this is difficult to listen to. You will not be rewarded for multiple listens. It is what it is. It’s not enough, by a mile. West has clearly made this for himself first, and indulgence is deeply ingrained into the concept.
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Jun 1, 2018About half the album has West as a role player on tracks that suggest a theater scene, with a handful of voices playing characters (quite possibly all living inside West’s brain). The album moves from spoken-word monologues to more expansive musical settings that try to “take the top off (and) let the sun come in.”
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Jun 4, 2018This disconnect between intent and delivery is explicit the entire album through. From the harried, unfinished-sounding "No Mistakes" which is built on a skeletal Slick Rick sample and almost nothing else, to the choppy breaks for chorus in "All Mine", to "Wouldn't Leave" which is basically a Francis and the Lights demo with a Kanye scratch vocal quickly added in.
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Jun 1, 2018Ye‘s emotional claustrophobia is at times effective: As a chronicle of living with mental illness, this is Kanye’s most unsparing work to date. ... But Ye just feels unfinished, as if he wanted to avoid another debacle like the rollout of the also-unfinished The Life of Pablo and turned in a rough draft to make deadline. Unlike Pusha’s Daytona, which is all muscle and sinew, Ye feels like a mix of the weakest moments from The Life of Pablo.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 889 out of 1222
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Mixed: 142 out of 1222
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Negative: 191 out of 1222
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Jun 1, 2018
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Jun 1, 2018great album, focused, short but amazing, I'm in love, it's on repeat since it dropped.
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Jun 1, 2018No growth from his previous albums... I expected better. This album is instead mundane, repetitive, and unoriginal.