KIDS SEE GHOSTS - KIDS SEE GHOSTS

God Kanye, you’re a slippery devil. After months and months of taking to social media and TMZ to stir up as much controversy as possible and prove the age-old adage “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” wrong, he drops this. It’d be really easy to ignore his childish antics and self-inflated egoism if he wasn’t just such a damn good artist, perhaps the definitive artist of my oft-lamented generation. He’s like the exaggeration of every millennial stereotype thrown about by the Boomers and Gen Xers: entitled, self-important, egotistical, and most of all, special. He’s really fucking special.

And let’s not forget about Kid Cudi, who pulls off the impossible by committing penance for his lackluster four album run that includes the unholy “grunge” (and I use that term in the loosest possible manner) abomination Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven. He’s shown promise before, specifically on his Man on the Moon double-feature, but KIDS SEE GHOSTS is the first time he really sounds like he’s in his element. “Reborn” is effortless. “Cudi’s Montage” takes an old Kurt Cobain outtake and turns it into a spacious R&B anthem. It’d be easy to dismiss this as the product of Kanye West’s musical guidance, but to dismiss Cudi’s contribution to this duo would be doing him a major disservice in the way it’s impossible to dismiss David Gilmour as an inferior to Roger Waters; they’re both just as important. Cudi’s crooning is the soul of this collaboration.

If there’s anything KIDS SEE GHOSTS lacks, it’s length. Short album was the running theme for Kanye’s Wyoming Sessions, working masterfully with the Pusha T album. However, with two narrative voices as unique as this, KIDS SEE GHOSTS demands more time. Kanye is dropping some of his best bars in years, and it’s a shame that songs like the punchy-yet-underdeveloped “Fire” don’t go anywhere past a catchy verse or two.

That being said, the melting pot of Kanye’s off-the-wall production and Cudi’s affinity with grungier soundscapes is truly a thing to behold. And as Kanye proves atop a wonderfully quirky sample of Louis Prima’s “What Will Santa Claus Say?”, he’s not slowing down anytime soon.