By Ryan Broderick

The newest Kanye West album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is good. It’s very good.

In what could possibly be the defining album of his career, West proves perhaps West is as great as he thinks he is.

MBDTF is everything you’ve heard from Kanye West before, strings, vocoders, R&B samples, electronica, stadium rock, prog, ego, it’s all there. But it’s never been quite this monumental.

With so much pop music, you turn it on, you hear everything you’ve heard before, bop along and change the channel. On Kanye West’s earlier efforts, excluding 808s and Heartbreak, one could put on the CD and have something steady and danceable for the majority of the record. MBDTF is not like that.

This is not a “put it on and zone out album”, this is a “Oh my God Kanye West I am sweating and nervous listening to your album” album.

Think about the probably three most well-regarded tracks off the album so far. The first single, “POWER” samples King Crimson’s “21st-Century Schizoid Man.” They’re definitely not the most palatable band to sample from. But it’s difficult to argue that the sample doesn’t fit pretty perfectly with West’s crushing lyrics.

One of the darker moments on the album is the brutal and exhausting “Monster,” featuring Jay-Z, Rick Ross, Nicki Minaj and Bon Iver. It’s barely more than a bassline and a beat to it, but it carries itself with such a swagger and psychotic inner logic to it that by the time Nicki Minaj starts rapping like a neon-pink goblin you’re mesmerized.

The album version of “Runaway,” the song he debuted at the VMAs this year, is 9 minutes long on the album version. It has strings, fuzzed out spoken word samples, a vocoder solo and most refreshingly West’s actually really nice undigitized singing voice.

Thematically MBDTF is the answer to the question the world’s been asking since Kanye West’s public implosion last year. What do you do after a fall from greatness? What do you do when you realize three of the most massively successful mainstream hip hop albums of the 2000’s only to get crushed under your own ego.

This was do or die and though the album doesn’t come out until next week, it’s already gotten rave reviews from places like SPIN Magazine and Rolling Stone. And the hype around it is at a fever pitch. It’s no mystery his G.O.O.D. Friday mixtapes went over well, and a few of those demos make it on MBDTF, albeit reworked silently.

And maybe it was the G.O.O.D. Friday Mixtapes that came first or maybe they came second, but whatever happened in that studio, West has more friends helping him out on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy then he has had in a long time. 808s and Heartbreak was relatively lonely in terms of guest stars and on Graduation he was doing more of the guest singer for choruses, but this time he’s got a whole group of guest stars from all over the music world. Comedian Chris Rock and indie rock artist Bon Iver are probably the two strangest.

But that lack of fear of the strange gives MBDTF its depth. And what’s nice is he’s finally gotten away from being weird just for the sake of being weird. There are moods and motifs and sounds that pop up again and again and they’re used for something more than just showing off his new toy.

It’s still too early to call, but if My Beatiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is well-received it might end up being something truly great and there’s been a long time since pop music got a really intelligent album.

MBDTF isn’t without its faults and a few of the tracks get into their own groove and don’t seem to care much about anyone else grooving with them. It’s not something that ruins the album, but “So Appalled,” “Devil In A New Dress,” and “Hell Of A Life” could either be a little more lively or at least a little shorter. West dwells a little too heavily and might give their crunchy electro riffs a little too much credit.

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy might be more than a pop album, it might be more than a rap album, West might not care what it is, but what’s definitely clear is that it’s a solid and powerful piece of work and that’s definitely a new standard for West’s peers. When the album drops next week ignore the hype, listen to it, spend an afternoon, spend an evening, treat it like a novel, sit with it. It’s not an easy album, it’s challenging and it shifts and bucks and turns on you and respects you enough to follow it to the end.