Kid Cudi – Indicud

This is the eagerly awaited release from rapper Kid Cudi. An artist whose previous 2 releases ‘Man On the Moon: The End of Day’ and ‘Man On The Moon 2: The Legend of Mr Rager’ were highly acclaimed and full of Cudi’s signature brand of experimental Hip Hop and both featured radio hits like ‘Pursuit of Happiness’ and ‘Mojo So Dope’. Both strong albums that I really enjoyed and would rate them among some of my favourite Hip Hop albums ever, (strong claim I know).

This album however, where do I begin? I suppose the best place would be at the beginning, the first track I will admit I enjoyed, it has this dark and brooding Nine Inch Nails type industrial beat, this was unexpected, but it worked. Track 3 ‘Just What I Am’, I also enjoyed, the beat hits hard and the flow over the top works well. It reminded me of something that would have appeared on Cudi’s first album. Track 12 called ‘Beez’, it has a sort of dub reggae vibe to it,I also really enjoyed this track, but when it has a feature from The RZA, how could it not be?

This however, is where it stops for tracks I really enjoyed, and at 18 songs in length, this is really poor. Some of them really outstay their welcome, some of them have a terrible beat or terrible lyrics, or in some cases, REALLY terrible features, (I’m looking at you track 17 with the Michael Bolton feature). Previous to this, I have generally enjoyed Cudi’s lyrics, not the deepest rapper in the game, but the lines about smoking weed, family, life and friends combined with his signature croon or his rap drawl have always been enjoyable, but for most of this album, I just wasn’t feeling it, and I’m not even completely sure why, it just feels uninspired, like he’s run out of ideas. It’s not like it was laughable poor, it was just dull, not something that I’d still be humming days later. There are exceptions of course, like the lyrics to Girls, which in fact are laughably bad.

I think I’m going to need to talk about track 10 called ‘Red Eye’ which has a feature from a popular girl group called Haim. This was potentially the worst song I’ll hear all year. It sounds like a 90’s pop song that would have been left on the cutting room floor, a song I couldn’t bring myself to listen to more than once. It just doesn’t feel like it belongs on a Kid Cudi album, and for someone with such a strong previous output, it doesn’t make sense why it would be here at all.

I don’t want this to seem like I completely hated this album, because I didn’t, there were parts on it that worked well, but the problem was, that there just aren’t enough of them. For example I enjoyed the Kendrick Lamar verse, but the rest of the song just wasn’t good, I didn’t like the beat, and I didn’t enjoy Cudi’s verses on it. I think if this had come from anyone other than Kid Cudi, I would have enjoyed it more, but for someone whose previous albums I enjoyed so much, this was a huge let down, and when he was tweeting about how this was going to be the greatest album ever released, that only added to the feeling of disappointment.

Who knows though, there is a lot going on in this album, maybe it’ll grow on me.

4/10

For Fans of: Kanye West, Wiz Khalifa, Being Disappointed.

Tom Reed