Take a look at the album title: Kid Cudi's heading back to the moon. The timing makes sense. His first two albums took place there, both of which went gold. Now that he's drifted away permanently from the G.O.O.D. Music axis, a return voyage probably seems appealling. The first track, "Destination: Mother Moon" sets the course—it opens on a horizon-blotting synth panning overhead, and it conjures some genuine fear and awe (Cudi's always been good with synthesizers). But the instrumental bleeds quickly into the first full track, "Going to the Ceremony", and, inevitably, Cudi shows up. On the chorus, he intones "I"m going ... It's. All. Happening,", suggesting that your only companion on this lunar vessel is a hyped-up mid-level marketing associate.
The moment is the Kid CuDi catalog in miniature: A vast, serene, often-beautiful vista of sounds —and then this guy, standing right in front of them. Kid Cudi has been standing in front of his own music ever since his 2009 debut, doing whatever he can to distract you from his genuine talents: a composer's ear for atmosphere, a professional producer's taste in tone colors. His lyrics, however, remain darts thrown at a barn door. "You're such an adult, pay all your bills, yet you are a zombie," he sings on "Going to the Ceremony". His singing is ruthlessly flat, and his melodies doodle noncommitally around the same three-note melody he's been humming ever since "Day N Nite". His go-to cadence as a rapper is more "Adam Sandler imitating a rapper" than "rapper." These traits were hard to ignore when he showed up, and he's done absolutely nothing to minimize them in the interim.
Of all these issues, his lack of melodic imagination as a singer is the most damning and difficult to get around. He sabotages almost any track he breathes on. The synths on "Too Bad I Have To Destroy You" sparkle like light on water, little off-beat accents coursing beneath and piano notes providing the bass line. It's a smooth, exhilarating piece of music, but Cudi defaces it, stuttering and tum-de-tum-tumming all over it, like an eighth-grader who wondered into the unattended studio and left his own vocal track just for laughs. Pick any track: on "Internal Bleeding", he assumes a mush-mouth delivery that might be a stab at dramatizing the condition in the song title. Maybe we're supposed to imagine this guy singing on the floor with a mouth full of broken teeth? At any rate, the music tumbles down around him like a drunk grabbing onto a curtain rod.
To navigate successfully around a Kid Cudi album, then, is to get really good at squinting at the periphery. A lovely little piano figure here, a sonar blip traveling through the mix there. Mercifully, SATELLITE FLIGHT ups the ratio on instrumentals to Cudi tracks, and they are, to a degree that is near-comical, the best and most listenable pieces of music CuDi's ever released as a solo artist. "Return of the Moon Man" blends a chugging string quartet figure with mournful reverb'ed guitar, while Imperial March horns—notably similar to Yeezus's "Blood on the Leaves" —blare overhead. It could almost have snuck onto the last Fuck Buttons album and gone unspotted. "Copernicus Landing" is a calm, glowing maze of New Age synths, the sound of machines chattering quietly to each other. Crucially, Cudi never utter a word.
Something surprising happens at the eleventh hour of SATELLITE FLIGHT, however, and it bears mentioning. The sci-fi synths drop away, as does the dead-eyed chest-puffing. Cudi sings—sweetly, modestly, and in tune—over nothing but some guitar, finger-picked with athe level of skill that suggests a deep study of Green Day's "All By Myself". The song is just two chords, but the voicing is haunting, and as Cudi hums to himself a sweet little melody, he instantly transforms into another possible version of himself: an indie-pop sad-sack troubador, recording on a bed strewn with K Records 7-inches. It's an unlikely sight, but it's a glimpse of the guy that's never quite made it onto a Kid Cudi record before. May his next record consist entirely of sci-fi instrumentals, or anti-folk ditties, or both.
