Review: Tyler, the Creator - Goblin
Much like the foul-mouthed tirade against uncooperative music blogs that opened his first album Bastard, Odd Future leader Tyler’s follow-up Goblin features several caveats, including: “Hey, don’t do anything I say in this song, okay? It’s fucking fiction”
It’s sort of hard to talk about Tyler and his Wolf Gang without getting into a moral debate about the content of their lyrics, but dammit I’m gonna try. People can enjoy Eric Clapton’s “Layla” without worrying about him being a homewrecker trying to cop off with his best mate’s wife.
First and foremost, Tyler’s skills as both an MC and a producer are totally unique in the current cookie-cutter hip-hop landscape. His voice is gravelly to an almost Tom Waits-level (definitely more so than a nineteen year old’s voice should be) which makes the rhymes he is (at times literally) spitting all-the-more vicious.
The rapper’s mind was already a very, very dark place, full of Oedpial complexes, Daddy issues, and transgressive impulses; now, the internet hype machine has dumped a whole extra portion of neuroses into that mix of things to rhyme about.
Goblin is an angry, scary album, full of teenage angst and self-destructive urges (no more apparent then on the incendiary ”Radicals”, with the chorus “Kill people, burn shit, fuck school”), with Tyler spilling his guts with lucid and disturbing intensity and delivery.
And he does so over sprawling, dense, atmospheric beats that recall a more contemporary — and more aggressive — spin on Tricky’s Maxinquaye.
Tyler and his Odd Future ilk are a thoroughly modern hip-hop group. Self-aware to beyond the usual rap pop culture references, nakedly confessional but with transgressive flights of fancy, dark but somehow still with a pop sensibility shining through at times; yep, a fucking walking paradox.
8.8/10
Goblin is out on XL May 5th
Watch the video for “Yonkers” here
