Kanye West - Donda Review
However you look at the album, it’s not a one-sitting affair. Certainly not for the faint of heart. Unfortunately, those of you looking to indulge in a single listen will likely grow tired once or twice when the real issue sets in.
I still remember being pencilled in last July to review Kanye’s then-supposedly-upcoming tenth album, Donda. So imagine my surprise when one year later, after four rounds of listening party hype, significant content revisions, public beef and the usual Yeezian derangement (catch me googling “Kanye Joker Drake thing” for that last one), the album finally dropped in the middle of last Sunday. And it seemed a lot like Kanye was similarly surprised, revealing that Universal dropped Donda without his express consent (possibly only to drum up more hype). Whatever the case, the album is now here. In its present form it clocks in at almost two hours in length, packed full of twenty-seven tracks.
This is a long album. So long in fact that I was able to walk the dog in a 10km route at a fairly leisurely pace around my hometown and still have six tracks to go, including the then-unavailable ‘Jail pt 2’, which is its own can of worms best left uneaten. Two years in the making, featuring cuts that the more resourceful Kanye fans had already sniffed out during the making of what was once slated to be Yandhi, such as ‘Hurricane’, this album falls somewhere between masterpiece and nightmare. It’s an equal in mayhem to The Life of Pablo’s hectic production and rollout, and as ambitious as My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, packed full of the same scratchy yet slick Yeezusisms that have permeated his work since 2012 and the same godly streak that made Jesus Is King so alien. But is it good? Yes. Is it the MBDTF-killer many hoped for? In places. Was it better than Certified Lover Boy? Yeah, actually.
What I can say conclusively in the album’s favour is this: Kanye’s rapping has never been this tight, at least not since his early work. Each track that focuses on Ye’s flow impresses, even where some of the lyricism veers into the realm of the tacky. No longer are those regrettable lines the likes of “If I fuck this model / And she just bleached her asshole / And I get bleach on my teeshirt / I’ma feel like an asshole”; we’re into the realm of cheesy dad joke line Kanye: “Cussin at your baby mama / guess that’s why they call it custody”. So an immediate mark in the album’s favour is West’s competence and confidence as a wordsmith and a vocalist for a change, something we get too little of given his main strength has historically been on the production end. Ironically, though, this seems to entail a more pared-back production style. Gone are those maximalist moments that made Pablo and Fantasy so epic in scale. Instead, West recycles a few too many beats — but again, we’ll get to that.
However you look at the album, it’s not a one-sitting affair. Certainly not for the faint of heart. Unfortunately, those of you looking to indulge in a single listen will likely grow tired once or twice when the real issue sets in. Inherent to any album nearing to the thirty track mark is the concept of track fatigue, when you realise you’re forty minutes deep and you could’ve listened to any of West’s 2018 albums twice over. Fortunately, and thank god for this, the album manages to maintain a solid level of engagement for much of its duration — a veritable miracle given the length and track quantity. ‘Donda Chant’ is an almost haunting opening, sonically similar enough to its successor, ‘Jail’, that the transition feels more seamless than sudden. That second track is a nostalgic romp with Jay and Ye; ‘God Breathed’ has an infectious enough hook despite growing tiring and lacking. ‘Off The Grid’, following this streak of solid starters, is a delicious main course, chased by a sparkling slick feature from The Weeknd to wash it down with ‘Hurricane’. By the time these five are out of the way, you’d almost be done one of Kanye’s shorter projects. But we’re not even a fifth of the way through the track list. It’s relentless. And that relentlessness is the album’s fatal flaw.
There are great moments that warrant a boogie, like the aforementioned banger ‘Off The Grid’ or the warm and mellow ‘Believe What I Say’. Unfortunately, some tracks get lost in the thick of it all. The more gospel-oriented inclusions are, surprisingly, more robust as holy tracks in a lot of ways than those on Jesus Is King, more genuinely pious and humble than any of the narcissistic mistakes Kanye sneezed onto his previous album, except for when Westside Gunn thanks god that his gun didn’t jam, but it’s fun to see some Griselda names on this album. Unfortunately, while ‘24’ hits the mark on this front, ‘Remote Control’ doesn’t. It features some Daft Punk-esque vocal distortion in its midsection, though even for someone suffering from Daft Punk withdrawals this isn’t enough to make the track any more interesting. The ending is hilarious, though, classic Kanye move to include something so baffling. Five stars.
It’s a saving grace that this point in the album features ‘Moon’, ‘Heaven and Hell’, and ‘Donda’ back to back, the strongest triple-threat on a Kanye album since 2016’s back-to-back ‘No More Parties In LA’-‘Facts (Charlie Heat Version)’-‘Fade’. The first of this trio is warm, heartfelt, and the first emotional summit of this album’s steep climb. ‘Heaven and Hell’ feels like a sequel to ‘Feel The Love’ with its erratic scatting and visceral steady bars, introducing a sense of rising action to act as another serious high point of the album, fittingly right in the centre of the track list. We are right in the belly of the beast and it is an energetic and lucid trip. Last of these three, ‘Donda’, samples the titular lady herself. Donda West, accomplished scholar in her own right and tragic victim of cosmetic surgery complications, is the figure at the heart of this album. Her influence has loomed large in Kanye’s life and work, visible as early as ‘Family Business’ or ‘Hey Mama’; as such, it’s only fitting that she has several tracks written seemingly about her. It’s honestly a shame that there isn’t more of Donda on Donda, in any capacity.
‘Keep My Spirit Alive’ starts a string of tracks reminiscent of the backend of The Life of Pablo. ‘Jesus Lord’ closes in a more mature phone call than the “that’s Gabe callin’” moment on ’30 Hours’; ‘New Again’ has a a solid opening, but falls into a more boring slump than some of the other danceable tracks on the album, letting itself down. ‘Tell The Vision’ has a similar energy to the off-kilter and feral vibe on ‘Freestyle 4’. Though, without the freestyle part of it all, it’s ultimately unable to live up to the promise of its own hype and instead becomes a cerebral and droning piano interlude. It’s nice to hear Pop Smoke again, though. ’Lord I Need You’ starts to bring the album to a close, carrying on the more heartfelt elements of Ye or Pablo. ‘Pure Souls’ is sonically gorgeous, if a little short of meaningful content, which speaks for a lot of the album. It’s a long string of tracks, each ranking somewhere in the middle of Kanye’s discography quality-wise, that would be priming you for the penultimate and closing tracks on any other album.
That penultimate track would be ‘Come to Life’, the second emotional summit of Donda. Already, I’ve seen this lauded by some as the best track on the album — a kind of spiritual successor to ‘Ultralight Beam’ with piano and vibrating synth blasts instead of gospel vocals. Those pianos would be right at home in a Ghibli movie, making them so distinctive on this album. Its lyrics are Kanye at his most Kanye, singing about being crucified and about his daughter wanting Nikes, but the man is so untouchable at this point, so coated in a thick varnish of irony and celebrity, that fixating on these inclusions would go absolutely nowhere. It’s a standout moment, the emotional summit of the album’s quality, the perfect prelude to the rightful closer: ‘No Child Left Behind’. This is the same track we saw teased back in July, organ-heavy, with spacious and vibrant production that makes the vocals pop from Ye and Vory and the choir. It could’ve used more fleshing out since its initial promotional release, though as a closer it would have been fine.
It would have been fine. But following this we have a string of part twos, each as indistinct as the last, which only serve to grate on the legacy of the initial tracks. Not only this, but this part of the album is when the army of features becomes more hindrance than help. We have to deal with a DaBaby credit: a man not only famous for having the same three flows across his entire career but now infamous for being a homophobe who helped Tory Lanez violate Megan Thee Stallion’s restraining order. On the same track we find Marilyn Manson credited, in a limp inclusion that does very little but stir controversy as opposed to present any meaningful Christian message about redemption. Further back, on ‘New Again’, we’ve got world-renowned violent piece of shit Chris Brown, who needs to stop being involved in music I like, let alone on this album. These mutinous miscreants in the features hamper the release, as do the part twos. It feels as though Kanye, the pioneer of being cancelled, sees these big names getting scrutinised and it ignites feelings of kinship within him. But Kanye, for his many provocations and problems, is not like these men — he does not need to associate with them. Yet he does, and ultimately to the detriment of his art.
While I remember wanting more from his shorter releases, what I wanted was not quite this much more. If there is ever an eleventh album in the pipeline, somewhere in between would be fine. Strip it back, lose the controversial features for the sake of controversy, and hone in on the things that make this music work. And, while he’s at it, he should master the art of introspection —something he might not have done in a relatable way since 808s & Heartbreaks but something that he nonetheless seems to long for throughout this album. Hopefully this album will experience a similar post-release doctor down the line to that of The Life of Pablo, and we might see a Donda redux that would make Kanye’s mother proud. Because somewhere, in the twenty-seven tracks, there’s something beautiful. But right now it’s a little lost in the world.
‘Off The Grid’ goes hard, though.
