My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West is the most irritating man in showbiz, a position only slightly ameliorated by the fact that even at his worst-behaving, he's often right: Beyonce's video was way better than Taylor Swift's. Unfortunately, his last two albums squandered the goodwill engendered by the remarkable promise of his early work: Graduation was spotty at best, and while 808s and Heartbreak was clearly heartfelt, it wasn't actually very good. Only his slyly self-mocking cameo on Estelle's hit "American Boy" suggested the hype hadn't entirely gone to his head. So it's a pleasant surprise that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy not only is a welcome comeback in the face of self-inflicted adversity, it's by some distance his best work from start to finish. Both a well-paced, dynamic album and a mine of potential hit singles, the album is loaded from top to bottom with clever rhymes, solid pop hooks, and unexpectedly perfect samples. (Raiding Mike Oldfield's obscure '80s tune "In High Places" for the lovely vocal hook on the opening "Dark Fantasy" is only the start of the eyebrow-raisers.) Aside from the occasional sarcastic wisecrack, the facile wit of The College Dropout seems gone for good, but the relentlessly grim self-examination of the last two albums is leavened by the sort of wry humor that used to be Morrissey's stock in trade: finding peace in the face of personal apocalypse, the closing "Lost in the World" might become the "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" of the 2010s.