Kid Cudi - Speedin’ Bullet To Heaven ALBUM REVIEW

[Intro: Anthony Fantano]
Hey, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd, and it’s time for a review of the new Kid Cudi album, Speedin' Bullet to Heaven.

[Review: Anthony Fantano]
Kid Cudi is a rapper, singer, composer, multi-instrumentalist as well, it seems. ...Who had a pretty promising start to his music career, his professional/commercial music career in the previous decade. He was delivering some very moody, introspective hip-hop that not a lot of other rappers were. And while I didn't really go head over heels for his stuff, I thought his follow-up to his debut was kind of mediocre, I was pretty indifferent to it, but at least he wasn’t like a generic artist to me. He had a sound, he had a vibe, that I could recognize.

But, pretty immediately after his next album, Mr. Rager himself seemed to fall off — and not just quality wise. Like, he fell off the edge of sanity and started to release some of the worst music of this decade: the faux-rock album he did with that WZRD collaborative side project, also Indicud, which is a record that still haunts me to this day, to the point where I completely skipped over Mr. Scott Mescudi's next record, Satellite Flight. However, his new record over here... My morbid curiosity got the best of me because I heard it was a rock record. Actually, the lead singles that were teasing this album — songs like "Confused" as well as "Wedding Tux" and also "Judgmental Cunt" — these songs were kind of intriguing to me. I guess it was sort of interesting to see Scott going in another direction. What Cudi lacks in musical chops a lot of the time, he has in attitude and emotion. And [for] genres like grunge and alternative rock and punk music, emotion and attitude are the cornerstones of these styles of music, so Cudi might pull through on this one.

No, nope, no, no.

This is easily the worst record I've had to review this year. Maybe [it's] not the worst album I've heard this year — I mean there's certainly worse records — but the worst album I've had to review. And it's very rare that I define albums in those terms, but there have been some very special albums this year that came out and I had a very strong distaste for. But this one takes the cake. The hair cake.

This thing is almost completely unlistenable. The core of the album is eighteen tracks long, and — if that wasn’t enough — Kid Cudi saw fit to add eight more songs of demos and rehearsal demos, which are even more of a wasteland than the core of the record. On the last leg of this record, Kid Cudi spends this album pretending he’s like Kurt Cobain. It's like the first part of the album is what he thought was his "successful career," and then he offs himself, and then he spends the rest of the album convincing you that he was so great that you needed to hear these demos. ...When in fact the demos are so awful, they’re so weak, they're so badly performed, they're even less listenable than all the songs that preceded them.

But for the first section of this album, there are really two sides to it, one side where Kid Cudi is boring you to tears and the other side where he's essentially just annoying you and getting on your nerves.

So on the boring side of these eighteen tracks, Kid Cudi essentially recycles and repeats the most rudimentary of guitar riffs and drumbeats and vocal lines — to the point where the tracks just get stale within the first 30 seconds. Kid Cudi... He might deliver some decent sounds on the production on this record overall; I think it’s pretty cool that the analog tape definitely brings a nice heaviness and clarity and crispness and punchiness to these guitars and drums. But Kid Cudi isn't writing songs — so much as he's writing little snippets and slivers of songs and then just stringing them out for two to five minutes, like on "Confused" or "Screwed" or "Amen." The song "Fairytale Remains," as well. Honestly, I don't even know why I'm listing tracks out. That is basically the musical premise of almost every song here.

The difference with the tracks that are bearable, though, is that they are maybe a little more visceral, a little more explosive so it kind of makes them just enjoyable — in comparison with these incredibly stale and annoying songs. They're are actually some decent riffs on the songs "Fade to Red" or "Man in the Night." And still, even in the context of this god-awful record, I still enjoy "Judgmental Cunt." It's probably the most diverse and wild track on the entire record, and I actually wish Cudi took as many risks on the other tracks here as he did on this song, because the vocal performances are wild, the guitars are heavy, the drums are punk as hell. But the thing is, these halfway-decent tracks are nowhere near as plentiful enough or quality enough to raise the standard of this entire album. Needless to say, the slower songs — the more subtle songs, the ballads on here — are even more painfully boring. Tracks like "Wedding Tux" or the incredibly long song "Adventures." ...Which is not only needlessly long in-and-of itself, but it also features this asinine Beavis and Butt-Head skit at the end of it. Actually... Quite a few tracks actually end with a Beavis and Butt-Head skit. An honest-to-god appearance from Mike Judge, animator, writer, and voiceover artist, pretending to be Beavis and Butt-Head and acting out these really awkward dialogues in relation to this terrible album. Even Beavis and Butt-Head themselves can't seem to get on board with some of these songs, as Beavis kind of pops in to say, “Heh heh, I don't know Butt-Head.” And then the teacher pops in to go, “Oh, well, okay... Kid Cudi's emotional and buh buh buh buh buh, and I know you guys are on hallucinogenics.” I don't know where that came from. But, if there is kind of a moral in that, kids listen: drugs do not make you make good music. They really don't. You need to have kind of a base level of talent or at least some kind of like sober great-musical-idea before you just take tons of drugs and then embark on some kind of musical recording adventure, because that this will happen.

He just seems to travel further and further down this rabbit hole of awfulness, and I just kind of wonder how far it can go. How many albums until even the most deluded of Kid Cudi fans are gonna say, “Wow he's really making bad music this time”?

And there are other lyrical moments on this record that are just so hilariously bad, to go back to this "Adventures" track, like "[her] vagina is moist, I'll keep you safe, just hold my arm." And also this one thing I love: “No more chicken sandwiches, yes I'll pay for the damages.” Hell yes.

I will say though, quite a few of the lyrics on this record are incredibly dark, they're depressive, their suicidal, they deal in drug addiction. However, a lot of the very repetitive and very plain language that Kid Cudi uses on a lot of these tracks, I think, fails to kind of translate the pain that he's experiencing. Also, the fact that so many of the songs on this record are musically inept, it sort of keeps his message from having any impact. The music itself is so weak that Cudi's emotions and Cudi's messages on these tracks just aren't that well translated.

Not going to get too deep into it, but another thing that I have notoriously never enjoyed about Kid Cudi's music, once again, it's terrible here: the vocals. The singing on this record is by no measure good singing. You cannot argue that the singing on this record is good. You cannot! You can't!

[Mock-singing:]
“All I want is to feel complete..."
“I'm gonna make an album, it's gonna be a rock album!”

You know, the eighteen tracks that Cudi delivers initially on this album are bad enough, but then ones we get into the demo section of this record... It just turns soul-sucking. It's like, once you've knocked the person out, you're just jumping on top of them and holding their arms down and smashing their face in until they're just a bloody pulp of nothing. This album is the musical equivalent to just a mile of hot coal walking, it's sadistic, really, what Kid Cudi is doing to his listeners.

By no standard is this a good or even a "punk" rock album. [Laughter.] Ugh, he's lost his mind. He's just off the deep end, okay. And not even — like a, you know, you know — in a way where he's like doing this Captain Beefheart-kind-of-thing, where his music is just so whacked out and just so strange nobody can get it. It's not like that at all. It's like he's at such a high level of delusion that this... [Gestures to album art.] ...Becomes what you want to release as your album. Ninety minutes of this.

If I talk about this thing anymore, the migraine that this album, the seed of a migraine that this album planted in my head, is gonna get worse. So, for my sake and for your sake, let's just call it here:

I'm feeling a 0, on this record. A big fat goose egg.

You know, there are a few riffs here-and-there that are somewhat okay... But then the ridiculous lyrics and the Beavis and Butt-Head sketches just pull away from anything with this album had in terms of a saving grace, including the final moments of the record, the whole demo section. I'm gonna just leave. Bye.

[Outro: Anthony Fantano & Cal Chuchesta]
Antnee, you always hatin on the Kid Cuddly! You know, you think you're so...

No, uh-uh, nope. There's no Cal thing going on here, okay. There's no Cal thing going on here. This video is over. There's no more jokes. There's no... [Waves hands and makes wild noise.] It's done, okay. It's over, so bye.