"All Day" [ft. Allan Kingdom, Theophilus London, and Paul McCartney]

Photo by Erez Avissar

Even minus flamethrowers, even with the vocal take riddled with gaps: "All Day" is still the first sign that Kanye has something formidable to unleash with So Help Me God. "Only One" and "FourFive Seconds", both ingratiating, felt timid, smoothed-out—polite in a way that doesn't suite Kanye's combustible energy and will to dominate. The studio version of "All Day" is an odd hybrid: The beat is a clanking grandfather clock of old, septic parts, some borrowed from Kanye's brief drill fascination and some sourced from the poisoned well of Yeezus.

Kanye's rapping harder, faster, sharper than ever: Years and years into his evolving style, he’s fashioned his voice into something dull and jagged at once, a hacked-off piece of jetliner assaulting the beat. Here, he seethes, collapsing all the spaces in between the words until he sounds like James Brown imitating a tommy gun. He fires off insults like sparks from sputtering livewires, and his verses breeze past, blessedly free of "O-bamination" clunkers, showing him at his finest and most vivid: When he’s convulsing.

But the oddest part, by far, is the outro, when he falls mostly silent, allowing the roaring machine of the beat to take over. Things go completely sideways as a barbed chain of a synth sound swallows the surroundings: a voice hollers "GET LOW" like a rebel ducking to avoid searchlights. And then, Sir Paul, amiable uncle figure from "FourFiveSeconds", wanders back in, strumming and whistling carefree. The Smoke Monster synth, uncaring, devours him too, and everything pitches into the black. How this schizophrenic monster fits into So Help Me God is anyone's guess.