Kanye West — 808s & Heartbreak

808s & Heartbreak

Roc-A-Fella/Universal

Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

12/15/2008 2:25pm

WEST'S EXPERIMENTS WITH SINGING AND… OK. Wait, let's do this properly. Ahem. West's experiments with singing and Auto-Tune produce mixed results on this fourth album. The main problem isn't so much West's voice, which for some reason needs to go through a processor, it's that the songs are really just skeletons and rough ideas that haven't been fully sketched out. West filled the verses of "Love Lockdown" with bass and keyboards instead of what could have been a killer beat, and he's done the same thing with a string section on "RoboCop." Mistakes like these can be found throughout the album, but there are brief flashes of light where West successfully merges both singing and rapping, like on "Paranoid" and "Heartless," which is probably 808s' strongest track. We get that everyone is entitled to some kind of "artistic" album in which they change their style, and we get that West had some tough times over the last year, but please put the Auto-Tune away. Get your caps lock key fixed, too, while you're at it.

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