On The Life of Pablo, Kanye West is brilliant and frustrating, inspired and deluded – as we’ve come to expect

The 21st century offers a panoply of options for the pop star wishing to launch their new album. They can do it in time-honoured style: working the interview circuit, touring hard, keeping their fingers crossed for good reviews. They can go for the surprise approach and suddenly plonk it online without fanfare.

Or, if they’re Kanye West, they can hire Madison Square Garden and charge people US$160 a ticket to come and watch him play new songs off a laptop; show his new clothing collection in a presentation directed by contemporary artist Vanessa Beecroft that turns out to involve a lot of models just standing there for over an hour; give a couple of his famous speeches about the world’s failure to fully recognise his polymath genius; and hear him announce a video game that appears to entail the player piloting an avatar of West’s late mother, Donda, through the gates of heaven.

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West protested the games industry had proved strangely unenthusiastic about this latter idea, a state of affairs about which he sounded more surprised than perhaps he should have.

The whole thing was beamed to umpteen cinemas around the world and streamed online: 20 million people apparently tuned in. It was by turns rambling, chaotic, deeply underwhelming, impressively audacious and completely infuriating, which, whether by default or by design, made it a perfect match for the new release in question, The Life of Pablo, an album that’s also all of those things.

Its unveiling marks the end of a lengthy journey. Over the course of the past two-and-a-half years, the album has undergone four name changes and been through at least two almost entirely different iterations. At various junctures, its supporting cast has included everyone from P. Diddy to Paul McCartney. Indeed, it was still evidently in a state of flux during its world premiere. West subsequently spent another two days alternately tinkering with it and leaving messages on Twitter: at one juncture announcing “I am consumed by my purpose to help the world,” at another posting a series of gnomic Tweets about St Paul, who you got the sinking feeling was being added to the ever-expanding list of historical figures Kanye West thinks he’s not unlike.

But you don’t need to have been keeping close watch on West’s social media feeds to know that The Life of Pablo is an album that’s been faffed about with for a long time: it sounds like it. In place of the stylistic coherence of West’s previous album, Yeezus, with its distorted electronics and overriding air of screw-you fury, there’s a record that’s audibly undergone endless revisions. It appears to have had ideas thrown at it until it feels messy and incoherent: over the course of four minutes, the two-part Father Stretch My Hands endlessly changes tempo and mood, stopping and starting, its sound heaving from crackling old gospel samples to pop chorus to a stark mesh of bass, drums and snarling to a hushed vocoder interlude. The problem is that it doesn’t really have a cumulative effect: it just sounds confused and scattered, which may well reflect its author’s state of mind.

Feedback features West finally doing what the rest of the world has been doing for the past few years and wondering aloud whether he’s actually gone round the twist: in the background, a sparse loop, apparently made from the titular noise, thrillingly spins out of tune, then starts to cut out, supplanted by sudden bursts of atonal screeching.