By the close, as Pharrell croons sweet platitudes, Tyler's pondering a murder-suicide. On 'IFHY', he's torn by emotion, love twisting into hate and back again. Of course, this being Tyler, infatuation occasionally goes too far. Guests often add a disarmingly pretty element: Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier sings beautifully over the backwards beats of 'PartyIsntOver/Campfire/Bimmer', while 'Slater' takes an excursion through the city's ripped backside, Frank Ocean chorusing " her freckles look like candy bars/Hair blowing in the wind". 'Awkward' finds a chopped-and-screwed Tyler reminiscing about his first love, the girl he got but couldn't hang on to, his heartbreak compounded by a sweet Frank Ocean coda. The chorus, a chant of " Fuck that/Golf Wang", is Odd Future nihilism at its purest.īut actually, 'Wolf' marks the point where experience becomes more affecting than juvenilia. 'Domo23', meanwhile, feels a rare concession to the kind of music that people think Tyler makes: a rage-filled stomp that sees him call his manager a " slave master", namechecks One Direction, and raps about smoking PCP with Justin Bieber. 'Cowboy' takes a horror-flick tone, all suspenseful guitar and off-kilter drums, although as usual Tyler's tossing wisecracks from the gloom: " Life ain't got no light in it/Darker than that closet that nigga Frankie was hiding in". 'Jamba' is squeaky digi-funk laced with porno gasps and smart-skeezy rhymes – things like " cussing out Siri like a waitress with no patience/Oh, you want a tip bitch, well here's my dick for gratuity". Whatever, it's smart enough that you can pretty much forgive that the first handful of tracks are business as usual. In part, it's deeper storytelling: days after 'Wolf''s leak, the Odd Future forum featured a 100-page thread delving into the album's detailed metanarrative, isolating characters such as 'Wolf', 'Sam', and 'Salem', and winding right back to Tyler's 2009 debut 'Bastard'. Certainly, the beats have improved – Tyler's devilish gurgle drizzled like honey over bright jazz-funk keys and thunking J Dilla-like percussion. The shrink voice that quizzed Tyler throughout 'Goblin' pops up occasionally here, and at 71 minutes in length, 'Wolf' is nearly as long as its plodding predecessor. In the long run, though, the results were overlong, and the odd blast of " kill people, burn shit, fuck school!" came like sweet relief. On his second album, 2011's 'Goblin', he hit the mic like it was a psychiatrist's couch, spilling his darkest thoughts in a feat of psychic exorcism. For all of Odd Future's reputation as amoral rap hellions turning the nation's youth onto rape and devil-worship, the music of Wolf Gang's de facto leader frequently stews on things internal: the contents of his fucked-up head and heart.
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