THERE'S A RUNNING gag on the internet concerning Kanye West in the aftermath of the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards. Call him anything negative — obnoxious, an idiot, arrogant — and someone suddenly rebuts, "You spelled genius wrong."

And I have no doubt that this judgment is true: give him his space and he will always produce a work of mastery, rich with instrumental and lyrical skill unmatched by most in his craft.

It's been the case from The College Dropout onward, each album growing in strength and creativity from the last, and his latest work, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, is definitely no exception. The chorus of the album's first track, 'Dark Fantasy', after an interesting poetic Roald Dahl 'Cinderella' soliloquy retold in rap's own language by a Cockney-accented Nicki Minaj, starts with the question I think makes the entire idea of the album: 'Can we get much higher?'

He always seems to, and yet he — the man whose last album was almost dedicated to the 808 in an eccentric Andy Warhol sense, the man who has power-napped in his Rap Camp studio in Oahu every evening during recording while his instrumentals are playing on repeat and his collaborators are still writing lyrics, the man who made a thirty-minute short film for one song — always raises the bar from his previous projects.

The album is a gothic show of all his artistry growing from strength to strength, just as the title tells. Some of his lines simply catch you off-guard — "mercy, mercy me, that Murcielago" — and there are lyrics like that in almost every track that just throw you for a loop, as if he thinks he needs to wake up a constantly bored audience back into the action, which he doesn't.

The touch of class he adds to the soul guitar in 'Gorgeous' by putting KiD CuDi on the chorus with lyrics of desperate search and an address to the haters — "I won't ever ever let you live this down" — matches the spot-on theme of fame and its crippling manic effects.

Yes, folks, hip-hop has returned to having themes. Yeezy even sums it up in his lyrics: "and what's a black Beatle anyway? ...a roach?"

The track drips with depressing self-criticism pitted against a struggling sense of standing up to the media bullies that make him doubt himself, followed quite strikingly with a Raekwon verse with uplifting words to the listener interwoven with a grandly verbalized list of his accomplishments.

We've surely followed what he's been doing since performing in the 2010 VMAs, and any true fan would surely know about his G.O.O.D. Fridays project — a new track free on his site every Friday til Christmas.

But he doesn't get lazy, even while working on those two ideas simultaneously — the ones he shares in both, like 'So Appalled', get a lot of reworking before making it here, making the instrumentals more beautifully simplistic and the lyrics pop.

'Monster' remains a great deal identical to the first version, mildly bogged down by a lyrically empty appearance by Rick Ross, but redeemed by the real stars, including Bon Iver's frontman Justin Vernon. And might I add, contrary to what the radio says, Nicki Minaj is almost inconsequential here — Kanye and his mentor Jay-Z are the real lyrical monsters on this track.

And for those of us who are also fond of heavy metal, or at least love his musical sense and his interesting ways of using them as samples — listen to 'Hell of a Life' and try to guess what part of the instrumental is from Black Sabbath's classic 'Iron Man'.

My real favorite is 'All of the Lights': the beat is rich with lessons he learned from 808s and Heartbreak, with a beautiful violin interlude to begin, a choir of guest artistes including Elton John and Fergie, and lyricism reminiscent of 'Two Words' on College Dropout; the true power of rhythm and poetry, taken as far as it can go, with the instruments and the economy of words telling the whole story.

Obvious praise goes to 'Runaway', but still with the same poeticism and musicality from the website version, now nine minutes long, with a three-minute reprise dipped in a short violin shots and an AutoTuned vocalization that offers a drop of interest to the piece.

Another example of his skill is 'Lost in the World', again featuring Justin Vernon, with words that are darkly romantic, followed by a Gil Scott-Heron piece that sums up the theme of fame's effects pretty intriguingly — 'Who Will Survive in America?'

I could quite literally applaud this for a while, but I don't have the time or the space. Take my word for it - Kanye can get no higher.

Or perhaps he'll always top the album before. In any case, this is exactly what it says on the beautifully designed minimalist case: beautiful, dark, and twisted. Buy it and add this to your library quick, and don't forget that G.O.O.D. Fridays don't stop til Christmas, and those are just as awesome.

Rating: Buy it!

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