Milestones: Igor by Tyler, The Creator

Tyler, The Creator’s fifth album is about love, red wine, and psychotropic drugs.

Courtesy of Columbia Records.

Love is no fun, but at least music. Because this overwhelming state, when you feel sick and weak and not as the master of yourself, sometimes runs covertly, sometimes openly as a red thread through the solo albums of Tyler, The Creator. That’s why it’s not far-fetched that he has now made a whole album about it: About the very lonely part of this funny concept called romantic togetherness, the absolute helplessness, if it doesn’t go as planned, so more like always. And what did you learn from it in the end? That there is no such thing as control. ToJust to suppress this realization as soon as the time comes again. If this is familiar, it is because the vast majority of us were already a bit Igor at some point.

The whole story fights with the happy variant for the title of the most chewed topic in the history of pop music. Nevertheless, Tyler also retains his creative bite on Igor. Tyler, The Creator continues the musical calligraphy perfectly aligned with Flower Boy and, at the same time, takes it to a new level because on Igor, it does not just stand for itself.

The union of desolate guitars, a lot of soulful warmth, psychedelic elements, and an equal coexistence of singing and rap drives Tyler to new heights as a highly gifted arranger and enhances her again by telling a stringent story with her. He has never sounded as focused as here.

His friendly but definitely formulated pre-release on Instagram request not to expect a second Flower Boy and to devote himself to Igor in a quiet hour without distraction was now not a completely new approach to music promotion. And the first listening run, of course in the background, after all, you can’t dictate anything, is also all about the fact that you unconsciously wait for a new “911/Mr. Lonely” or “Who Dat Boy” where there is none, ergo: The album is meh, not shit, but also quite underwhelming, as they say.

But if you take Tyler’s request to heart, you notice that he is right. To continue the Rolling Stone BS bingo: We are dealing here with a concept album and grower in one. The aesthetics of Igor is based on the assumption that you actively listen, preferably alone and chronologically at a time. The fact that you wait in vain for hits here is because there should be none here. After all, they would uncontrollably unbalance the flow of the narrative of the album. Such an approach can already be called courageous in the age of the playlist.

And of course, there is rapping here; there is only remarkably little in the foreground, both in relation to the vocal parts and in the sound image as a whole. If you only listen with half your ear, you really don’t notice at first that there are vocals at all, so much you are conditioned to hearing them like standing in the spotlight. On Igor, the voices of Tyler and his numerous features are equally mixed with the many elaborate details of the instrumentals.

In other words: Kanye West in the hook of “Puppet,” you don’t notice any more than the contributions of people like Charlie Wilson, Solange, Santigold, Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, or Cee-Lo Green or Pharrell Williams, who are usually granted significantly more presence in music during guest appearances. Here, they all have to subordinate themselves to the score of the maestro and are hardly even allowed to perform entire parts. The fact that they are not even listed in the tracklist is also quite against the tide in terms of attention economics.

In terms of content, Tyler has simply omitted the classic first act of getting to know each other and gets in after the intro with the completed facts: “You make my earthquake,” the synthesizers shimmer like drunk, everything feels easily stepped away and diffuse, must be love again. From there, Igor goes heart-shit steeply down into the warm arms of a dysfunctional relationship (“wasted, boy, I need your attention/I’m off balance, I need some fixing/ I’m your puppet, you are Jim Henson”), from whose embrace he does not want to detach himself and finally can less and less (“Is it my free will or is it yours”). Because in the end, it is an emotional power gap and an associated progressive loss of dignity and self-esteem.

“But at some point, you come to your senses.” In “What’s Good,” Igor comes to the rescue of the old Tyler on a rough old-school beat to make himself straight: “Hard to believe in God when there ain’t no mirrors around.” Snorting with anger when breathing deeply no longer helps is the first step to clear your head. In fact, however, Igor has the strength to go the conciliatory path: “Gone Gone / Thank You” is followed by a sober “I Don’t Love You Anymore” and the closer, “Are We Still Friends?”

Lyrically, Tyler delivers the honesty and directness that is necessary and avoids the lard and the kitsch that would be deadly for such a story. Quite directly, so to speak, closed to interpretation, this is about an unhappy love story between two men. In dealing with his own sexuality, Tyler, The Creator has come a long way for someone whose homophobic outbreaks were once an integral part of his music. And that has nothing directly to do with Igor but gives him a whole shovel more beauty.

Musically, the coiled, warm instrumentals are entirely in the service of the red wine and psycho-pharmaceutical mood that the album wants to tell. What seems informal when listening, by the way, in reality, merges gently fluently into each other. Igor sounds immensely from one piece, but if you listen more closely, you will notice the diverse references that Tyler serves: The first part of “I Think” is a fairly obvious tribute to “Stronger” with cleverness because the beat is replicated in a completely different mood. “New Magic Wand” sounds like an appreciative nod toward the last BROCKHAMPTON album (Iridescence). The first part of “Gone Gone / Thank You” is Tyler, The Creator’s version of a psychedelic Japanese pop song. All this connects Igor by means of dense, detailed arrangements that warmly whistle to the extent to which this still sounds like a hip-hop beat, but as soon as you hear the oppressive, clear Neptunes basses behind the Wall of Sound, they are, of course, that too.

Here and there, the master’s great love for the arpeggiator function of his keyboard is somewhat redundantly noticeable, individual parts he raps down a track too functionally, and really debatable is Tyler’s excessive use of strongly alienating effects on his normally laconically rumbling baritone, which can be recognized among thousands. Although, in the end, a matter of taste, it is a pity to hear him so little here. Apart from this criticism at a very high level, Tyler, The Creator with Igor is becoming more and more one of those people whose music you are sure in advance that there is only something horny can come. Here, he sounds far from it, as if he would run out of ideas in the foreseeable future. He is disarmingly honest, sophisticated, at the same time united, and above all, influences primarily like Tyler, The Creator.

Great (★★★★☆)