Review Summary: Obama hamburger sussy balls
Album is unfinished so this review will be too. Donda 2 is the latest album(?) from Kanye West who is currently sinking deeper into absolute madness. it’s probably the most expensive album ever made besides that wu tang album the big pharma guy bought. $200 for a stem player just to get the chance to listen to it. And man am I glad soundcloud exists because if I dropped 200 big ones on an album like this I’d be filing a class action against kanye for jerking me around. Nothing is finished here. The beats are pretty good and there’s still that trademark Kanye style present, but his verses (when they actually appear) are blatantly unfinished or poorly written, sometimes both. If you’ve ever heard an unreleased Kanye bootleg where hes just mumbling gibberish over the beat with a few cohesive lines, that’s the whole album (except you have to pay 200 ***ing dollars to hear it). That’s what this album feels like. Rough demos, throwaways or clearly unfinished ideas. This makes Jesus is King look like the Mona Lisa. If you thought Donda 1 was a chaotic unfinished mess, then you’re going to have a field day here. Listen to ‘Louie Bags’. Listen to ‘Keep it Burning’. Just listen to them. Does that sound like a finished product to you? When people criticise mumble rap, they usually say that it sounds like someone muttering gibberish that means nothing, which isn’t the case. But here, it is. It means nothing. It sounds like nothing. It IS nothing. Kanye might as well have just made the tracks 3 minutes of white noise, it would have the same effect.
there’s some nice ideas here. ‘Flowers’ has a great beat and a pleasant melody but kanye sounds like he recorded his verse on his phone at 3am trying not to wake Kim and Pete up across the road. His voice is so dry you can feel your mouth getting cottony just listening. ‘Security’ has a great Yeezus’ type beat and delivery but Kanye’s verse is so ***e and laughable that it invalidates much of the track’s goodliness. Is that a word? I don’t care and neither does Kanye, as evident by the state of this record. ‘True Love’ has a pleasant beat (recycled from ‘Runaway’ which retroactively sullies that song too) and a nice posthumous X feature, even if it feels almost comical that they’re still dredging his body up to appear on songs now. I mean for Christ’s sake, his hook is lifted from a live stream where he mumbled a few lines and then changed the topic. Kanye drops some surreal lines about his kids tunnelling out of the house to come see him which would be funny if it wasn’t so cripplingly depressing. Then he criticises them for wearing Nike instead of Yeezys which is honestly so pathetic it actually makes me angry. People have said it before, but there are ways to go about dealing with divorce and losing loved ones. Kanye has shown us before that he CAN make music like that. I mean, ‘808s and Heartbreak’ is one of his most beloved and influential albums. But on Donda 2, that feeling of heartbreak and loneliness is replaced with wallowing pity that points the blame at everyone but Kanye. It’s Kim’s fault! It’s Pete’s fault! It’s Kris’s fault! Etc, etc, rinse and refeckingpeat. It’s so tiring and honestly annoying. The album is only 50 minutes but it manages to feel longer than Donda (you know, the near 2 hour album?), mainly because there’s such a dazzling lack of enjoyability here. The features are mainly okay. Sometimes they absolutely suck like Future’s putrid verse on ‘Pablo’. Sometimes they’re very pleasant like Don Toliver’s very lovely appearance on ‘Broken Road’. It’s a very mixed bag, which perfectly describes Kanye’s output since 2016.
The second half of the album isn’t that bad, in all honesty. The run of songs from ‘Happy’ to ‘Lord Lift Me Up’ are surprisingly effective and quite emotional. ‘Sci-Fi’ in particular is probably the best song on the album and features some lovely production and vocal work. It actually sounds finished for one (could do without the Kim SNL sample though). ‘City of Gods’ is great, but that’s mainly because it’s a Fivio track that features Kanye and not a Kanye track featuring Fivio. ‘First Time in a Long Time’ featuring Soulja Boy is actually not bad either. ‘Eazy’ is dodgy though.
Well that’s that. Album isn’t finished, album isn’t very good and it’s all a bit depression and laughable. Sorry for the half assed review but if Kanye isn’t going to bother then neither will I. Maybe in a year I’ll rewrite this to match the updated Donda 2 but who knows, It hardly matters.
Standouts: Broken Road, Flowers (kinda), Happy, Sci-Fi, Selfish
Skips: most of the rest
