Snap Judgements

Time to do some quick record reviewing. I'll use this as an opportunity to say how much I love MySpace Music. Their collection is amazing, and being able to stream entire albums before they come out makes me feel much more law-abiding. It's a wonder the music industry didn't start this years ago. Like, when Napster came out.

Anyhoo, let's get down to it:

Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak

Yeezy gets down to his emotional side. After a year in which his mother died and he split with his fiance, he was feeling some pain, and this is the result. Whatever one thinks of Kanye West, he's anything but conventional.

The album's an intriguing mess. In the event you live in a box and don't know, there's no rapping here, no samples, and barely more than a few instruments per song. The result is a cold, methodical, haunting sound that doesn't change enough to be truly great. A few of the tracks, including the initial singles "Love Lockdown" and "Heartless," really swell up and attach themselves to you, whether you like it or not. But on a whole, the album's a bit one-note, repetitive and uncompromising in its bleak outlook. It's nothing great, but it's still something special.

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The Killers - Day And Age

The Killers are a band made for the modern era but desperate to have been from the '70s. That is to say, they make great singles, but ultimately would rather make great albums. The problem is, they're painfully unaware that they're incapable of this.

Hot Fuss featured classic songs "Mr. Brightside," "All These Things That I've Done," and "Smile Like You Mean It." The album sucked. Sam's Town featured classic songs "When You Were Young," "Read My Mind," and "This River Is Wild." The album sucked.

This one features a few solid tracks, particularly "Losing Touch," the album opener and high point. It's a soaring rock track that belongs right up there with the aforementioned songs, but the rest of the album can't live up. Maybe one of these days they'll get that cohesively great album that lives up to the potential of their singles, but I can't help feeling they won't achieve that until they stop trying to.

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Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy

If Kanye's new album was a rushed, small, introspective album, this is the opposite. It took nearly two decades, and it's bombastic as hell. But it's just as much if not more of a mess.

Then again, I'm not the world's biggest GNR fan, so the most I can say is that there's nothing here I see myself listening to in a year or two, no classic songs on the level of "Sweet Child O' Mine," but it's not particularly bad. It just doesn't stand out at all. For any other album, that'd be just fine. For this one, I'm left thinking "we waited fifteen years for this?" Sorry, Chuck Klosterman, I just don't get it.