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808s & Heartbreak
Kanye West
Roc-A-Fella/Universal

Remember Kanye West at the last Grammy Awards? He sang a song for his mother, who had died after cosmetic surgery. It didn't matter that he could scarcely carry a tune; the wobbly performance made his tribute more touching.

Who would have guessed that West would sing every track on his next record? Not naked and alone as he did at the Grammys, but with a big dose of karaoke courage from AutoTune, the software that can make anyone sing on pitch.

The catch is that AutoTune also strips out the little imperfections that makes a voice sound human, and that often contribute to a moving vocal performance. Kanye's perfected voice is so bland that I'm not surprised he chose to tweak it further with other kinds of vocal processors.

So we have a Frankenvoice, singing about heartbreak, or more often about the petulant response of someone whose worth has been underappreciated. This is a familiar complaint from Kanye, whose tantrums at award shows are legendary, and who never tires of trying to get us to see him as he sees himself: "the voice of a generation," as he told British journalists last week.

"You'll never find nobody better than me," he sings grimly, in Heartless. "My reign is as far as your eyes can see," he continues, in Amazing, the title of which mostly refers to him.

The other prominent gadget on this disc is the Roland TR-808, a vintage drum machine whose sound may be to hip hop what the Hammond B-3 keyboard is to R&B. Its best innings come in Love Lockdown, in which the 808's rampaging beats and Kanye's short propulsive phrases add up to an addictive single.

Coldest Winter is the album's best song, in conventional terms, and would be good to hear covered by a real singer. Several other songs are full of reminders that Kanye first made his name as an inventive producer, though the discordant click-track in Say You Will (A and B-flat beeping a near-octave apart against a song in C minor) is beyond annoying.

Used sparingly, on a track or two, the 808/AutoTune matchup would have been fun. But at this length, it feels as flat as the heart-shaped balloon on the album's cover, and not just because the vocals are so drab. Kanye hasn't got the capacity for introspection, or the lyric-writing skills, to pull this off. Song lyrics are shorter and more condensed than rap verses, and generally less free-wheeling, which means he has little room for the kind of verbal élan we got in tracks like Gold Digger. He's playing to his weaknesses, not his strengths. What a heartbreak.