Jesus Is King — Kanye West
One could say that Kanye West is now working with the largest backing cohort he’s ever had as the newfound leader of his Sunday Service gospel group congregation. With this weekly concert series, West has taken pains to distance himself from the troubled figure he cut on the promotional cycle for his last solo full-length album, ye. What ye signalled with its rushed, haphazard release was that the perfectionism that we’ve come to expect from West is all but a distant memory. Where the Chicago native’s celebrated oeuvre has largely borne the distinctive traits of having been tirelessly laboured over, lacklustre efforts like The Life of Pablo, ye, and now, Jesus Is King, seem to suggest that he has dropped his once lofty standards.
That is not to suggest that West has forgotten how to make a banger, just that it doesn’t amount to a cohesive-sounding record in the end. While tracks like “Follow God” and “On God” find West at his effervescent best, they’re interspersed with tragic duds like “Closed on Sunday,” “Water,” and “Hands On.” One of the album highlights, “Use This Gospel,” sees West tap long-time friend, Clipse, to rap over a beat built over vocoder-humming, and what sounds like the alarm that goes off when your car door isn’t shut. Pusha-T and Malice oblige with their trademark tenacity before Kenny G interjects for a surprising, but effective, saxophone solo.
Kanye’s anxiety as a father has figured prominently into his work of late. Gone is the wisdom that he displayed on “New Day” from 2011’s Watch the Throne where he hoped his son wouldn’t replicate his mistakes. Instead, a toxic masculinity has pervaded Kanye’s thinking both as a husband and father to young daughters, which has manifested itself in some interesting lyrics. In ye’s “Violent Crimes,” we heard Kanye claim he now sees women as “somethin’ to nurture,” but curiously also wishes that his daughter, North, doesn’t inherit his wife, Kim’s, curvy figure in the same verse. The same twisted thoughts about women’s bodies have followed Kanye to Jesus Is King in some small fashion — perhaps Kim, who was displeased with “Violent Crimes,” has played a part in getting him to tone it down — where he opines about the virtues of keeping your daughters safe in “Closed on Sunday.”
In the end, what hurts Jesus is King is the shallowness with which West engages with the heavy themes on his mind as a man of revitalized faith. While he claims Jesus saved him from releasing Yandhi, by doing the so-called “laundry,” West would have done well to give his shoddy work on Jesus is King a similarly close audit.
Dawn Chorus— Jacques Greene
Those who enjoyed Philippe Aubin-Dionne’s 2017 debut album, Feel Infinite, might feel discombobulated upon first listening to the electronic stalwart’s follow-up to that overdue effort, Dawn Chorus. While Feel Infinite found Aubin-Dionne (who performs as Jacques Greene) operating comfortably in his wheelhouse of club-inspired melancholia to great effect, Dawn Chorus finds him in uncharted territory in terms of both theme and composition. Having grown tired of the loneliness that often accompanies life as a celebrated bedroom producer, Greene opened himself up to a scale of collaboration he hasn’t explored thus far in his storied career.
Shifting from the cramped confines of Toronto to sunny L.A. — where he took refuge in Hudson Mohawke’s studio — Greene enlisted a laundry list of collaborators that included Julianna Barwick, Cadence Weapon, Ebhoni, Rochelle Jordan, Oliver Coates, and Brian Reitzell.
Setting out to make a record that echoes the bittersweet feeling of leaving a festival in the early morning after a night of ecstatic revelry, Greene set himself strict parameters that would force him to break the habits he’d developed. Having grown very comfortable with sampling acapella R&B vocals, Greene veered away from his comfort zone and sought out the talents of his friends when he needed a voice to layer on top of a track.
One such instance occurred when he tapped Canadian rapper and one-time Edmonton Poet Laureate Roland Pemberton (stage name: Cadence Weapon) to spit over the lead single, “Night Service.” The result is perhaps the best, or at least most literal, distillation of the theme that Greene sought to create. Pemberton paints a vivid picture of raving in the bloghouse days that’s charming in its particularity. He comically references a bygone era when DJs would drop The Rapture at parties, and girls strove to dress like Chloe Sevigny. All of this is done over a hypnotic, pulsating beat that could have been at home in Greene’s excellent 2018 EP, Fever Focus.
Greene has mentioned that he was heavily inspired by seminal 90s shoegaze acts like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive in the making of Dawn Chorus, and that he specifically tailored certain elements of his recording setup to mirror the scuzzy effects heard in their music. Further adding to the layered feel of the record is Greene’s subtle play on the album’s title, which is in reference to the morning bird song that occurs at dawn, when a strange electromagnetic phenomenon also takes place. In homage, Greene has littered the album with snippets of bird chirps and electromagnetic pulses that he ripped from the internet.
The end result is perhaps an album more suited to a night of solitary introspection than as the backdrop to a late-night rave, but fans of Greene’s will relish his attempt at growth.