Their synth-driven electro had blasts of funk momentum. And in places, especially on the breezy, slick “Paranoid,” this music is redolent of the chilly, slightly irregular R&B the producers the Neptunes were making four or five years ago, for Kelis, Omarion and others. West try to sing these songs is far weirder. West has cited the electro-pop pioneer Gary Numan and T J Swan, who sang exuberant, nasal hooks on many a 1980s Queens rap track, as vocal reference points for this album, though in truth hearing Mr. By any measure, these are seismic changes, yet he persisted with recording.

West split from his fiancée, Alexis Phifer. His mother, Donda West, died last November following complications from plastic surgery. West would have been forgiven for taking a break after releasing “Graduation,” his third album, last year. After all, what is Kanye West without scale? At worst, it’s clumsy and underfed, a reminder that all of that ornamentation served a purpose. At best, it is a rough sketch for a great album, with ideas he would have typically rendered with complexity, here distilled to a few words, a few synthesizer notes, a lean drumbeat. “808s & Heartbreak” sounds like none of his other albums, nor any rap album of note “minimal but functional” is how he has described it to MTV. And so, as he’s dismantling his storytelling structures, he’s also making his productions skeletal, and largely trading bombastic rapping for vulnerable singing.

West’s earlier albums, he would have quickly undermined this sentiment of course a shopping spree would cheer him up but here, bluntness is the goal. On “Pinocchio Story” he continues his lament: The product of a tumultuous year in his personal life, it operates solely on the level of catharsis no commentary, no self-consciousness, no concern for anything but feeling.

Kanye west 808s and heartbreak era