By Stephen Park, Staff Writer
CUDI: Kid Cudi’s new album is an ear sore.
Kid Cudi was first introduced as an assistant writer and vocalist on Kanye West’s 808’s and Heartbreaks. Since then he’s made a name for himself, with two very ambitious studio albums, Man on the Moon: The End of Day and Man on the Moon 2: The Legend of Mr. Rager. Both strayed away from classic rap, with its talk of ego and girls, to a young artist painting a drug-induced, surreal, paranoid and sad musing of songs that would later garner him critical acclaim. His latest album Indicud has that same ambitious drive, but does that make it as good?
To start, his junior LP does a lot of things right, but does things wrong in equal measure. It’s certainly not going to win him any new fans and it might even scare off some of the older ones. In Indicud, Kid Cudi strips away his old “No one understands me” music style and replaces it with a musical eulogy to nightmares and sad thoughts. While packed with ingenuity and creativity, it lacks good production value. The highlights of the album are interesting at best, but the beats are repetitive and boring and overall shed light on Cudi’s inexperience as a producer.
The album begins like a dead dream. The heavily warped synthesizers fluctuate reality like a bad acid trip, when suddenly drums break the veil of a spacetime nightmare. The distortion and chilling vibe of “The Resurrection of Scott Mescudi” is an odd but fitting way to ease into the album. That’s because this musical embodiment of a paranoid schizophrenic is all you’ll be hearing for the entirety of Indicud. With a few exceptions here and there, the majority of the album’s beats are like an ode to a cheesy sci-fi soundtrack. It’s more a foundation than a landscape, but the simple, monotonous beats allow his vocals to really shine.
However, what the album lacks in production value, it makes up for in good songwriting. Cudi covers a lot of subject matter throughout the album. “Immortal,” for instance, talks about deciding to leave depression behind one day, whereas “Cold Blooded” takes a sharp turn in the other direction, using a catchy afterparty beat infused with the dark underbelly of a nightmare, and showcasing Cudi’s skill as a lyricist to explain the recesses of an acid comedown. Even though the emotion isn’t as raw or spellbinding as that in his previous albums and mixtapes, Kid Cudi’s lyrics are oddly relatable.
But there is one very major flaw: the rap hip-hop album doesn’t feel like a rap hip-hop album. It’s more a man reading his diary over some makeshift beats than something I’d call revolutionary or an artist trying to rediscover himself. Songs like “King Wizard” and “Burn Baby Burn” feel like they’re more for venting Kid Cudi’s Famous Blues, than for musical enjoyment. Overall, Indicud is something that only a true Cudi fan could pick up. Anyone else will have a tough time enjoying this album. There are songs worth buying by themselves, but they’re not enough to make the entire album worth purchasing.
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