Cherry Bomb Review

The mix is the story. Tyler pushes the whole record into the red on purpose, drums clipping, guitars distorting, his own voice fighting the arrangement for room, and in 2015 nearly everyone read that as a man who could not finish a song. Reviews were the worst of his career and he has said since that they sent him back to the craft. What the pans undersell is how much of this is not noise at all.

Find Your Wings is slow gospel built from horns and stacked harmony with no rapping on it. Okaga, CA closes the album on chords no other rapper is writing that year. The two part single at the center is an aching, straightforward pop song in its second half. Smuckers puts Kanye West and Lil Wayne on the loudest beat here and lets them shout across it.

Set against those, Deathcamp and Blow My Load and Pilot are exhausting by design and stay exhausting on the tenth listen. The writing is the weakest link, still assembled from provocations and bits, with none of the emotional access the next two albums find. A tenth anniversary vinyl sells out and a generation of listeners now calls this his hidden peak, which overcorrects. It is a mess. It is also the exact spot where the mess starts pointing somewhere.