On “Girls”, a track buried somewhere in the middle of his new album Indicud, Kid Cudi moans, “Tell me something that moves me.” As a longtime fan of Cudi’s first two albums, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed when I finished Indicud and wanted to yell that line right back at him. Cudi, ironically enough, sounds nothing but bored on most of Indicud’s songs, but as if that weren’t enough, he’s also boring. The haunting soundscapes and trancelike melodies that made classics of earlier songs like “Mojo So Dope”, “Day n Nite”, and “Pursuit of Happiness” are nowhere to be found on Indicud. Instead, we get an 18-song mess of sloppy production with no center of gravity.
Kid Cudi generated a lot of hype for Indicud by revealing that he was handling the production for the entire album, but that, if anything, is the album’s crippling flaw — moreso in the first half than the second, but even so, it’s a very disappointing issue. The sound that previous producers such as Plain Pat, Emile, and Dot da Genius brought to the table is gone from Indicud, replaced by what sounds like a half-baked impression of Cudi’s old songs. When I first heard “Immortal” leaked on YouTube, I was pretty sure the song wasn’t finished, but the album version was identical, and just as hard to listen to as the former. No song makes this case better than “Solo Dolo Part II”, which has none of the charm, darkness, or addictive sound that the first “Solo Dolo” — a Cudi classic — had.
Another thing that must be noted is that the album is very dependent on features from other artists. In hip-hop, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (see Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or Dre’s 2001), but on Indicud it is. When the best rapping on the album (RZA on “Beez”, A$AP on “Brothers”, and Kendrick Lamar on “Solo Dolo Part II”, though he’s drowned by awful production) is being done by rappers who aren’t the author of the album and the best hooks on the album (unquestionably Father John Misty in “Young Lady” and Haim in “Red Eye”) are being done by artists who also aren’t the author of the album, that’s not good. Kid Cudi isn’t even in “Red Eye”, seriously.
That’s not to say Cudi can’t produce anything of worth. His rapping on “Burn Baby Burn” and “Mad Solar” hits some substantial highs (no pun intended), and the hooks on singles “King Wizard” and “Just What I Am” (the album’s best song, probably) are definitely infectious, but the rest of Indicud is sub-par. The first and last songs (instrumental stuff where Cudi flexes his production muscles) and the interlude “New York City Rage Fest” (???) suggest some kind of arching concept-album ambition, but on most of the songs (“Lord of the Sad and Lonely”, the unnecessary nine-minute “Afterward”, which actually has great production) he sounds like he was just dragged out of bed and asked to make up something on the spot. Hopefully by the time the next album rolls around, Cudi slides off his golden pedestal and re-develops the honest lyrics and artistic hunger that made his early music so compelling. Indicud tells us nothing that moves us. Score: 4.5/10.
Jake Bittle / A&E Editor
