Can anybody find a negative, or even "not great" review of the Kanye West record? From the mainstream passe Rolling Stone, to the record store clerk Pitchfork, to the hardcore intelligent hip hop fan Okayplayer, everybody says it's great and that it lives up to Kanye's own extravagant hype.

I don't know. I think it's good, even very good, but not great, and contrary to everything I've read it's not as good as College Dropout. It's also not as good as the first single ("Diamonds from Sierra Leone") suggests (which is a high bar because that sound is fantastic in every way). In some ways I agree with all the reviews, he is not trying to remake College Dropout, it sounds different and at the same time it still sounds like Kanye West. I also agree that his rapping is better. And he's definitely a victim of his own high bar here, but there are only two songs here (the singles) that approach the jaw dropping simultaneous originality of the sound and catchiness of his past work like Jay Z's HOVA, Talib Kweli's

Get By

. I know it's not fair but he did it last time with Jesus Walks, All Falls Down and that one with Mos Def and Freeway that I forget the title of. Hell there were two or three others on that record too. But there are a few track here that could have been on anyone's record ("Touch the Sky" "Bring Me Down" "Drive Slow"), which you can't usually say about Kanye. As I listened to the standard sounding Touch the Sky I could not believe it but I found myself bored and thinking "is this what the hype was about?"

This is a good record, almost a great record (like the 1st) but it is just a shade inferior to these superlative reviews.