The king is off the throne.
As a Kanye “Ye” West supporter, this is a sentence I have dreaded writing since the release of VULTURES 1.
Ye and Ty Dolla $ign released the second album of their Vultures trilogy, VULTURES 2 on Saturday, August 4th, 2024. Mind you, this came after months of radio silence from Ye and his team. I wasn’t as excited for this release as I was for VULTURES 1, but I was still interested in what Kanye would do with this new project. I wrote the album review for Vultures 1 back when it was released in early February 2024. Looking back on my V1 album review, I was wrong. That album is nowhere near an 8. I was clearly struggling to accept the fact that my favorite artist ever was indeed washed up. In all reality, that album is a 3 or 4 at best. You can read the album review of Vultures 1 here: https://www.southlakessentinel.com/top-stories/2024/02/29/kanye-west-ty-dolla-ign-vultures-1-album-review/
To start with the first track, we have Slide. Slide was a pretty good song, good groove, with a nice vibe to it.
The next track leads us to, Time Moving Slow. It was pretty decent and included a good performance from Ty$, but could be considered a little subpar for Ye’s standards.
Field Trip was next and was the highlight of this album. Very good song. It was a shame that I found out later that Kanye used AI (yes, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE on his own album) to make this song. Playboi Carti continued his impressive feature run that has spanned from Travis Scott’s UTOPIA until now.
After this, it all goes downhill.
The next song was Fried. Wasn’t good. It felt underdeveloped and blurry, and I ended up skipping it halfway through. Husband, very bad. Ye tries to do this ambient echoing and it just falls flat on its face. Lifestyle is carried by Lil Wayne. Bomb is in the running for one of, if not THE worst, Kanye West song of ALL TIME. Ty$ and Lil Baby do great on Forever Rolling. Ye, yet again, smears the whole song with his terrible lyrical choices and attempts at making a solid flow.
As I go deeper and deeper into the project, the worse and worse it gets. River was one of the many unreleased tracks that were supposed to be on V1. What does Ye do? Make it almost impossible to listen to by ruining a finished song and SOMEHOW making it sound unmixed, sloppy, and uneasy. 5:30? A fan-made Youtube mashup that Ye took at a lower quality, and then mumbled over at the end. Sky City is an amazing track with a nice guitar and a very relaxing atmosphere. I think you can assume what happens next. If you guessed “Ye’s AI verse comes in and takes the track off of the rails”, then you are CORRECT! By the end of this album I had no other comments other than this was just bad, horrid, terrible, and putrid sludge that is tainting his discography.
That is one of the worst aspects of this album. This pair of albums tarnishes Ye’s legacy. The truth is that unfortunately, Vultures 1 and 2 (and most likely 3) exist in a discography that includes the influential 808’s and Heartbreak, the greatest debut album of all time in The College Dropout, one of the most appraised and applauded albums ever in Graduation, and the magnum opus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. This doesn’t even include the groundbreaking, headlong-rushing, breakneck album of Yeezus, or the underappreciated The Life Of Pablo. Seeing the Vultures trilogy in a discography with these records feels almost wrong.
The aforementioned albums show a common theme of praise among critics and fans alike even with their age showing. An example of this praise is Ye’s third album, Graduation. Graduation sold almost 1 million copies the first week of its release, and since then has gone on to sell over 13 million copies worldwide and is confirmed to be 5x Platinum by the RIAA. A second example is The College Dropout reaching 20 years old this year, and has sold over 4 million copies worldwide in its lifespan including the 440,000 copies sold in its first week. For any project, that is impressive. For a debut album, however, that is almost unheard of. What happened for someone who was on top of the world a mere decade and a half ago to fall to a state where fighting to keep even the most loyal fans and supporters is necessary?
That is a question that I’m sure will be asked for generations to come.
