Goblin Review

Yonkers is the event. A rattling drum pattern, one bass note repeated until it becomes a threat, a video of a kid eating a bug, and suddenly a Los Angeles skate crew is on every music site in the country. Nothing else here works at that level. Goblin runs seventy four minutes, keeps the therapy conceit from the debut and stretches it well past its usefulness, and buries the good ideas under layers of deliberately ugly synth.

She is the one piece of real songwriting, a stalker narrative sung sweetly by Frank Ocean over a beat that knows exactly how uncomfortable it is. Radicals is a chant built to upset people and succeeds only at that. Tron Cat and Transylvania are the horrorcore lane at its most tiresome. Reviews at the time split between writers who read the violence as a character study and writers who heard a talented kid with no editor, and the years have been kinder to the second group.

This is the Tyler album whose standing has fallen the furthest. The production has one great trick and repeats it, the writing reaches for shock in place of a subject, and the sequencing asks for patience it never repays. The talent is unmistakable in the same way it was on the debut. This is simply not the argument for it.