More 808s

That’s the cover. At least according to Amazon and a bunch of blogs. I may not totally agree with the musical direction that Kanye’s taking, but I like the minimalist aesthetic of his album covers (I’m including the Love Lockdown and Heartless covers here) quite a bit. I still love the bears, but since this album looks basically like a one-off from the overall Kanye suite, it makes sense to deviate from that look.

Enough on album covers, though. There are some new tracks out there: the full quality version of “Coldest Winter” and a new one called “Robocop.”

“Coldest Winter” is still my favorite of the leaked tracks so far. It uses the bleak anti-emotive emotional power of AutoTune (see Kanye’s verse on “Put On” for the exemplary use of this) well. The lyrics are less than inspired, but damn, the final time those tribal drums come in over that single synth, it’s so fucking bleak I can’t help but feel a little sad along with Kanye. In that sense, this song is a success.

“Robocop” is basically begging for a club remix. Unfortunately, this means that probably everybody and their grandma is going to making one, and chances are the majority will be considerably worse than the actual song. In other words, this is an okay song, but it seems like it should be way more awesome based on those staggering drums and sirens and shit he’s got going on. Like everything else I’ve heard from 808s, the boring lyrics definitely detract from the song, too.

The interesting thing I feel as more of these songs come out is that I think I might end up liking this album way more that I first anticipated. I’m starting to enjoy the sparse production even if this is taking us one step closer to the inevitable future where we only listen to space music. And let’s not kid ourselves, this blog would be pretty boring if we weren’t always talking about this guy.

Oh, and those songs? I have no clue where to get them. But you might try looking here.

By the way, I apologize for not posting many links lately, but the man’s got us down and we’re working on building our brazenness back up.

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