Kanye West & Jay-Z - Watch The Throne

New Music Tuesday is a slight misnomer this week, as 'Watch The Throne' technically dropped last week. But it was a very odd sequence. It came out in iTunes only last Tuesday - then only Best Buy last Friday. I'm still not sure if you can buy this at a Target for example, because I think the exclusivity extends for another couple weeks. Regardless of all that, just look at the two names listed in the header - this is a pretty highly anticipated record. And yes, I bought it the day it came out. They started talking about doing an album like this back in early 2010. And immediately people got excited. 'H-A-M' dropped quite a while back and then 'Otis' dropped a couple weeks back. The next single 'Lift Off' is due to hit radio sometime next week as well. Now if you've heard 'HAM', then I think you'd have a certain sound in mind for what you expect this to be. Well friends, it isn't that. It isn't a 12 track go hard kind of record. It's so up and down in terms of style and pace - I'm not really sure how to ingest this. What I love about it - the guys do a pretty great job jotting down lyrics and going hard spitting them on the mic. What I find odd is the way the album plays. It seems so not coordinated in places which makes it kind of odd to listen to. But I think with that, comes the fact there were probably so many different ideas and thoughts they wanted to convey on one record. And that made this mash-up too strange. Now don't get me wrong - I still like this, but maybe I expected more? Is that the way to put it? I'm going to listen to this another 100 times or so, which will help me decide my opinion. But right now, it's well worth a listen, but I'm too confused to what the overall message is. What do they want me to hear and take away from it? Right now, it's a bunch of mix and match tracks that form a really cool packaged cd.



TRACK LISTING:

1. No Church in the Wild

2. Lift Off

3. Ni**as in Paris

4. Otis

5. Gotta Have It

6. New Day

7. That's My Bitch

8. Welcome to the Jungle

9. Who Gon Stop Me

10. Murder to Excellence

11. Made in America

12. Why I Love You

13. Illest Motherfucker Alive

14. HAM

15. Primetime

16. The Joy



Listen To Samples



Top 3 Tracks:

1. HAM

2. Otis

3. Lift Off



FINAL RATING:

3.75 out of 5 stars