Review Summary: Business as usual for Tyler, the Creator.
As per usual, Tyler, the Creator has managed to disappoint by falling short of his own hype. On
Wolf, that came through as "Domo23", a nasty red herring that was little representative of its dour parent album. With
Cherry Bomb, it came in the form of "Deathcamp", 3-minutes of signature Tyler vitriol punctuated by Cole Alexander's razor sharp guitar riff. In contrast with Earl Sweatshirt's
I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside, an album in pursuit of a mature, unified, and succinct vision, Tyler's youthful abandon shines through in those 3-minutes when recklessly declaring that, 'Who I are really isn't important!'.
It's a shame then that the rest of
Cherry Bomb doesn't follow suit. Wandering a miasma of subpar
In Search Of... and
No Love Deep Web clichés, Tyler refuses to create any cohesive material. When he's not doing his best to channel Pharell, such as on the rather lousy likes of "F
ucking Young / Perfect" or "Find Your Wings", he's doing his best to smear his compositions with scratchy noise. That approach is significantly an issue on the title track, where most of the tune is lost under a forced sense of abrasiveness. The problem isn't that the material is outright poor, but that underneath all the heavy-handed experimentation and boring attempts at subtlety there's the hint that substance could exist. It doesn't, and so the infuriatingly fist-pumping "Deathcamp" and Yeezy and Weezy flaunting "Smuckers" are left to show that Tyler probably could create a masterpiece if he so chose to do so. Instead,
Cherry Bomb exists as an album of sporadic highs and middling variety. In essence, it's business as usual for Tyler, the Creator.
