Kanye West And Jay-Z, 'H.A.M': Review

It barely seems like five minutes have passed since Jay-Z and Kanye West announced their plans to release joint album, yet today (January 11) saw the arrival of 'H.A.M', the first song to be taken from the duo's forthcoming effort 'Watch The Throne'.

As one would expect from two rappers who separately have created their own lasting legacies in rap music, fan expectation behind the release has been extraordinary. Speaking about the album on Twitter at the end of last year, West, who initially made his name as the producer of Jay-Z’s 2001 album ‘The Blueprint’, hailed their collaboration as “so modern so hood so club so hip hop”. It was so good he couldn't even stop to punctuate his sentences.

Fast forward to the early hours of New Years Day and West was at it again, telling a crowd at a private party in Las Vegas that they would get to hear the first exert from 'Watch The Throne' this month.

And, despite often being one to get carried away with his words, this time he wasn't wrong.

From the outset, 'H.A.M' erupts into life sounding like an extravagant call to arms. The hard-hitting drum beats rattle like short bursts of machine gun fire - a signature of producer Lex Luger's work. (He most recently worked with West on the rapper's solo album 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy'.) But Luger hasn't stopped there. 'H.A.M's' stand out feature is its operatic backdrop, which grows in intensity alongside West and Jay-Z's lyrics until you feel like you're listening to a film soundtrack rather than a rap single. It's fittingly opulent.

That's also a quality 'H.A.M' retains in its lyrics, with both West and Jay-Z rapping about going as “hard as a muthaf*cker”, and the latter at one point bragging about his wife Beyonce's wealth: “N*ggas ain't got my lady's money.”

For a creative relationship that began over a decade ago, West and Jay-Z's quality shows no sign of being on decline. Indeed, 'H.A.M' is arguably their most relentless effort to date, and a song that will doing nothing to quash the expectation for 'Watch The Throne'.