Bastard Review

The frame is a therapy session. Tyler plays patient and counselor both, and the record keeps returning to that couch every time the shock material threatens to become the entire point. He is nineteen, he produces every track himself on gear he can barely afford, and the sound is exactly what that means: thin drums, murky keyboard patches, a mix that swallows half of what he says.

None of it stops the writing. The title song is a long letter to a father who never arrives, and he refuses to resolve it. Seven and Sarah are ugly and controlled at once, character studies from a kid who has clearly thought about what a character is for. AssMilk, with Earl Sweatshirt, is the crew at its most gleeful. The dead weight is real. Fifty six minutes is far too long for the ideas here, several guest verses are filler, and the slurs and rape jokes that got him noticed read now as a teenager reaching for the loudest button in the room.

What survives is the voice, and the fact that he already knows how to build a person out of one. Critics who filed the shock and moved on came back once the rest of the catalog existed, and the record now turns up on all time lists that would have laughed at it on release. As a debut it is more blueprint than building. It is his blueprint and nobody else's.