IGOR - Tyler, The Creator: Review

Tyler, The Creator

is a California based rap artist who came up in the early 2000's out of the Odd Future collective. Since then Tyler has evolved into a genre bending superstar dabbling in fashion, television and of course producing and rapping. His 2017's album Flower Boy turned his popularity dial up to 10 with its sharp shift in sound to a much poppier approach that attracted many mainstream fans and IGOR is the follow-up to the project now two years later. 

Review By Lavender:

I was born at just the right time to have grown up with Odd Future and I remember so many essential moments of their rise to fame like they were yesterday. You may think this would land me in a position to be constantly defending the achievements of Tyler, The Creator, but I find myself more often than not arguing with his stans over those very same achievements being drastically overhyped. Unlike his Odd Future contemporaries Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean who have dropped numerous brilliant albums between them, Some Rap Songs, Doris, Channel Orange and Blonde, Tyler has a much more hit or miss discography. His debut full length project Bastard hit right in the height of internet mixtape culture and is an album that I'm willing to bet most modern day Tyler fans have never heard before, but it is one I enjoy quite a bit. This is followed by the first real diversion I have with the Tyler fan-base on 2011's Goblin a painfully long winded and vomit inducingly edgy album that turned me off from the moment I first heard it. But once again there is a dichotomy as I was back on their side defending 2013's Wolf a much more engaging and unique album that proved the variety of talents Tyler had under his belt. Almost as if there is a pattern developing his next album was what many consider to be his worst. 2015's Cherry Bomb is the sound of a good artist getting lost in the semantics as the album has some decent songwriting and good tunes but suffers from the most asinine and overblown production of this entire decade. Full of awful vocal effects and terrible mixing (those two things are important remember them) Cherry Bomb was Tyler's most experimental album and simultaneously his biggest miss. So it should be no surprise that he turned around and made the most accessible and pop oriented album of his career and it became a huge hit and his runaway success. Flower Boy was an album that I liked a lot and it cracked my top 25 albums of that year but I could tell straight away that the quality of the album was being dangerously over-inflated and in the two years since the projects release it is no better. Flower Boy has become a multi-medium sensation and a decent album that far too many people are calling a modern classic. So given how far Tyler fans are willing to go to defend every element of his songwriting in the wake of Flower Boy it was no surprise to me that IGOR was receiving absurd praise immediately upon its arrival. What did surprise me is just how much I disagree with the stans on this one and just how MANY hoops one would have to jump through to convince themselves the quality of this album is acceptable. 

Since there were no singles for this album let's just start off with the first track here Igor's Theme a song I assumed would be an intro, until I saw that it was three minutes long but once you've heard it you may wonder what exact purpose it serves here as well. The song has a sharp snare kick that is catchy and had me smiling straight away but the smile was well gone as over the next three minutes of the track Tyler and Lil Uzi Vert wander through some of the most random and uninspired singing through completely formless passages for a track that throws you into the deep end of the albums flaws straight away. For a full introduction of the issues that seep throughout Igor check out I Think a few songs later. The track has a truly good instrumental at it's core that would be good straight away IF you took over the pointless, distracting and completely unnecessary static that makes it hard to even tell what it going on within the details of the instrumental. Tyler is decent at points here but we are also introduced to the albums second achilles heel, awful vocal mixing. It reminds me so much of Billie Eilish's debut album earlier this year because there are decent songs at the core of a lot of tracks here that are completely ruined on the production side with some of the most asinine choices you'll hear on an album all year. 

New Magic Wand is the best example of this, as well as by far the worst song on the album. It is a complete misfire of a banger with verses that get worse and worse as the track goes on leading up to its final moment. By the point where you're three quarters of the way through this track the performance slides into real physical pain territory with the grain on Tyler's voice bordering on some form of human torture. And an unfortunate cherry on the cake that is this shitty song is that there is a decent rap verse at the end of this thing that is also hampered by bad vocal mixing and doesn't do nearly enough to save the already disastrous song. I Don't Love You Anymore which I was really hoping was a Bomb The Music Industry cover, is the low point of the second half of the project. It's a decent track at its core but it features some incredibly slow and taxing rap verses which is unfortunate because Tyler does so little rapping on this album, but this is a moment of wasted potential that I can't rationalize including on a studio album. 

Thankfully those are the tracks I straight up don't like but unfortunately some of the bad choices on the production side of this project seep into otherwise decent songs. Earfquake is a moment early on the album that experiences this in a very unfortunate way because they hook that Tyler delivers here is pretty sharp but the distortion and pitching effects almost completely destroy it. Not to mention Tyler spends most of the beginning of this track formlessly saying whatever comes to his head, before outsourcing the only real verse on the song to Playboi Carti, who admittedly kills it with a verse that is one of my favorite points on this entire album. Running Out Of Time has the opposite problem where the chorus is really the only thing I can get behind and I still think it deserves a better mix. This is a well written song that is good in its start and finish but unfortunately it gets an amateur treatment with some annoying snapping that persists in the beat for nearly the entire song and blown out bass that very nearly ruins the entire mood of the song every time it comes on. Finally Puppet is another decently well written song that sees Tyler given off a fast paced series of bars that are pretty sharp and Kanye West give off a quality feature, both of which suffer from two different types of awful mixing that could turn this song into a great one with a few changes. 

Gone Gone / Thank You is the last of these moments because the first half of this track is really solid. Tyler's sweet but pitched up vocals are okay but what really does it here is the fantastic hook. Genius tells me that this is Cee Lo Green by himself and I'm not sure if I believe that but if it is true than good for him because this is far and away the best hook on the album and the performance is fantastic. Tyler rattles off a throwback rap verse on this track that reminds me of some of the more questionable moments on Wolf but ultimately it is refreshing at the point it falls on the album. If you weren't aware Tyler has a streak of making the 10th song on each of his albums a two part song and this track suffers BIG TIME for it. Thank You may be the worst moment on the album with some awful blaring keys that may as well just be fuzzed distracting from an already annoying pitched up Tyler singing one of the least catchy refrains I have ever heard. It is a real shame that this awful moment was tacked on to one of the albums best songs just to keep the theme up. 

For an example of how to use the blown out keys in a good way check out the albums closer, the fantastic Are We Still Friends. This is probably my favorite of all the moments where Tyler is singing and the whole track strongly resembles Kanye's The Life Of Pablo with its sunday service inspired gospel aesthetic and instrumental build. It ends the album off on a really beautiful moment that features a level of songwriting I wish had been applied to the rest of the album.  There are a pair of fantastic songs right in the middle of this album that serve as it's bright points. A Boy Is A Gun is an excellent song with Flower Boy inspired shimmery production that is supportive of what the song is doing unlike so many other tracks here. It doesn't fit with the albums sonic theme much but given how excellent the hook is and how great Tyler is on the song I am not complaining, just happy to have some more good tunes lacing the tracklist. 

Finally is the track that along with Earfquake we will all probably be hearing nonstop all summer, What's Good. This is the albums lone true success at making a banger and it is a good one. The beat is killer and the vocal distortion FINALLY makes sense and actually heightens the tune in a great way. But Tyler doesn't even stick with the aesthetic the whole way through which opens up some questions about all of his decision making on the album but I won't even go there. What I do know is that this is a fantastic banger of a track and one of my favorites on the album, but even given that I would rather listen to Who Dat Boy any day. 

That comment leads into a section I don't normally include in reviews I do. I'd like to address the reception this album has received for the first time since Kids See Ghosts last year. That's because it's the first time since Kids See Ghosts that I've seen such a mediocre album receive such unanimous acclaim based solely on the artists who crafted it. I think it would probably be a good exercise for Tyler stans who have been calling 10/10 AOTY on this thing to sit down and listen to the album again and think about just how much better it could have been with competent vocal mixing. How many of these songs would instantly become good without awful aesthetic clashes in the instrumentals? How is a song like New Magic Wand an acceptable level of quality from a songwriting, production or performance standard? This is a very average album that, spoiler alert, I'm giving a 6 to and what I think is causing the severe separation between public opinion of the album and its actual sound is for one, the swarm of stan culture that has surrounded Tyler since Flower Boy and two, the fact that many people are correctly pointing out a lot of what this album did right. Tyler executes a lot well, his songwriting is sharp on more than half the album and he sounds like not just a veteran rapper but a veteran musician as he pulls from soul music of the 60's and 70's across this project frequently. On top of this the story of a toxic on again off again relationship that is weaved throughout this album is a consistently compelling one that makes reading through the lyrics a treat as I dove into the character of Igor and what motivates and inspires these track. The difference in perception is that I think a lot of people are ONLY hearing these positive elements and ignoring everything that they can't rationalize. The hoops that I've seen professional reviewers jump through to not call this thing what it is have been frankly absurd and I can't find what it is about Tyler or this album that inspires such a deep level of disillusionment among his fans.

IGOR is an average rap album with some high tier tracks that exemplify why Tyler The Creator is talented and some laughably unfinished songs that make it seem like he learned nothing from the failures of Goblin and Cherry Bomb. If this was a project by any other artist on earth the conversation surrounding it would be drastically different but when you peel back the dial on IGOR and remove it from the man whose face is on its cover you'll find that just barely more of it is worth you time than not. 6/10

Best Track: A Boy Is A Gun

For more hip hop check out my review of Kevin Abstract's Arizona Baby here.