album review - goblin

just like tyler in this album, i have to wonder whether or not my experience with goblin was in my head or not.

goblin is the one tyler album i cannot stand. this man has produced so many amazing songs over his career across 9 whole albums that are on average an A and at minimum a B minus. then there's goblin with a D. i do not truthfully want to hate goblin, but the first time i listened to it i ended up so exhausted after that the second time i tried listening to it i just tapped out after tron cat.

the sound of goblin is the main thing i like about it, but even then it isn't without flaw. the gritty, gross sounding synths throughout the entire thing really benefit the intense vocals and lyrical content and it has the potential to be one of tyler's most varied with that context in mind. it's funny i say that, because varied is not what goblin is. yonkers and she are the only tracks in this album that i really like, maybe radicals if i'm generous and golden on a good day. the rest are all either uninteresting or drag out to hell and back, but that's a problem for later, not now. she uses the album's signature synths in an interesting way and yonkers is just generally good, but besides that, as i said, most of the album's songs just do not interest me or bore me. forgettable is the last thing i want a tyler song to be, and this entire album fleets from my mind. but why do i find them boring enough for that to be the case?

goblin is 82 minutes.

i don't think you properly grasp that statement, so let me say it again. goblin is 82 minutes. it is the longest tyler album by far. it is longer than wolf and longer than the estate sale rerelease of call me if you get lost. it is somehow, despite this, only 15 tracks compared to wolf's 18 and the estate sale's 24. how did tyler make a 15 track album that long? it's simple, really. he made half the tracks go on way too long and drag out so much that stale doesn't begin to describe how goblin feels. radicals does not need to be 7 minutes. nightmare does not need to be 5 minutes. by the time i got to window, which is 8 full minutes, i just tapped out for the last stretch of the album, i was not having this shit. why the fuck did tyler think making the album nearly double the length of bastard was in any way a good idea? it does not remotely need to be this long. call me if you get lost and wolf earned their length because it sounded like each track was doing something different with the album's trademark sound. this does not.

i want it to be known that you can listen to igor twice in the time it takes to listen to goblin and flower boy as well. please spare yourself the time and listen to any of his other albums. it says a lot that tyler himself called it horrible and only took back 7 tracks from it. that is just under half the album. what does that tell you about goblin?

3/10

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