Kanye West's "808s & Heartbreak" was generally well received by critics, and it similarly used Auto-Tune to represent a fragmented soul, following his mother's death. The album marks a departure from his previous album "Graduation". Describing the album as a breakup album, "Rolling Stone" music critic Jody Rosen wrote, "Kanye can't really sing in the classic sense, but he's not trying to. T-Pain taught the world that Auto-Tune doesn't just sharpen flat notes: It's a painterly device for enhancing vocal expressiveness and upping the pathos... Kanye's digitized vocals are the sound of a man so stupefied by grief, he's become less than human."