some of my fave new sounds (tylor the creator - bastard)

After a few decades of murders and crack deals, gangsta rap bloodthirst has lost a lot of its sting. But here we have a teenage skate-rat snarling in a demonic, asthma-wrecked rasp, talking about rape and dismemberment and coke-snorting and throwing in homophobic slurs, and suddenly every wound is fresh again. Bastard is a rough listen, to be sure; if you can hear it without wincing every 30 seconds or so-- without feeling some genuine despair-- you might have some serious problems of your own. But as with the most successful transgressive art, its ugliness digs deep into your brainpan and stays there.

And only some of the value here is of the shock variety. Tyler's nihilistic gargle has cathartic star-power the same way DMX's livewire grunt once did, and many of the antisocial jokes are genuinely funny: "I go to Obama rallies screaming out 'McCain!'" The self-produced, spaced-out, lo-fi beats transform warped, woozy skronk-noise into rap thump. Ariel Pink is a favorite of Tyler's, and it shows. In all its violent weirdness, Bastard forms its own universe, and he doesn't do it without context. At the end of the opening title track, Tyler lets us know exactly where all this animosity might come from: "Fuck a deal, I just want my father's email/ So I can tell him how much I fuckin' hate him in detail." --Tom Breihan