Speedin' Bullet to Nowhere

There is no arguing that Kid Cudi's recent release of his album, Speedin' Bullet to Heaven, left us questioning his creative output process. Many reviews I've seen for this album are from Cudi's general audience of hip hop heads with no rock background. Coming from someone who listens to alternative and punk rock on a daily basis, I feel the album fell short in more than one area. The album starts us off with very a "wavy" sound which we can connect to his previous mention of psychedelic usage in other songs. Although the guitar riffs are very nice to the ears, Cudi's background with hip hop and neo-psychadelia shows through by the lack of dynamics and variation with the instrumentation. Eventually all of the songs begin to sound very bland after listening for a couple of seconds. Any alternative rock artist could come up with a cool sounding riff, loop it, add drums, throw lyrics into it and end up with the same product. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's unoriginal, because this is all nothing but original.. But it simply doesn't meet even the lowest standard for an alternative rock/punk rock album. Now, the concept is there, what I'm getting from this is a solid uniform theme from most of the songs, man vs. self or man vs. society. But what throws me off is the occasional Beavis and Butt-Head skits, having nothing to do with the composition of the album other than a short story of them taking mushrooms while listening to it and then conversing. Not to mention the unnecessary rehearsal demos. He's still there with some of his lyrics, other than the fact that he goes from "lost in my reflection" to "her vagina is moist and warm" and "no more chicken sandwiches" in the matter of thirty seconds. I don't see his intention with a lot of these out of the blue scattered references. There is a lot of potential with the acoustic riffs and self reflecting lyrics... sadly he did not use this to his advantage.