IMPORT CD Amid mainstream rap's stagnant waters, Tyler, The Creator can feel like a glitch in the system. While contemporaries reckon against trap fatigue or labor for social media relevancy, the maverick rapper-producer exists on an island of his own, sailing over the horizon like an indifferent mystic every 2 years to deliver another singular LP. But where the recent IGOR and CMIYGL served up vibrant, neatly structured narratives, his seventh studio album, Chromakopia, proves a little harder to decipher -- this is Tyler at his most earnest, but also his most uneven. "Give a f*** about traditions, stop impressing the dead" runs searching opener "St. Chroma," and at first glance the album seems intent on breaking them: it's his first since 2011's Goblin without a divided track ten, the first to not feature his signature "ayo," and most importantly, the first to break his two-year release pattern since his 2009 debut, Bastard. "St. Chroma," Tyler's strongest intro to date, is an immediate collage of intent, flip-flopping from scratchy militarism to soaring gospel before making way for the equally explosive "Rah Tah Tah" and "NOID." But while this militia-like opening trio create a brilliant, unified new sound, the rest of the album drops it abruptly: "Darling I," "Take Your Mask Off," and "Judge Judy" sound a little like Flower Boy pastiches (the latter proving a particular lowlight with its grating "juuuuuuudge" chorus), while "Balloon" pierces the album's pensive closers with a misplaced, funfair-like irreverence. Tyler has produced his best material while building all-encompassing worlds for his ideas -- the drifting summerscapes of Flower Boy, the chromatic heartbreak of IGOR -- in contrast, Chromakopia can feel both impulsive and reiterative. Yet while Chromakopia's soundscapes do little to break the mold, his words tell a different story. The central St Chroma character appears to represent a masking of the truest self; Tyler spends much of the album unpacking his heritage, sexual preferences, and most surprisingly, potential fatherhood. Some of the moments here are among the most candid of his career: "Hey Jane" is a raw, sometimes ugly back-and-forth between Tyler and his potential child's mother, "Noid" lashes wildly at parasocial relationships and fame-driven paranoia, and "Like Him" sees Tyler "chasing a ghost" at the recognition of his father's features. The 33-year-old rapper's fear of ageing comes to a culmination on the beautifully nocturnal "Tomorrow"; hypnotically unfurling his regrets, Tyler shadows Kanye's iconic "Welcome to Heartbreak" with a conflicted "my brodie had another baby, that's like number two… and all I got is photos of my 'Rari and some silly suits." Chromakopia is less of a cohesive statement than Tyler's fans are used to hearing; it's erratic and candid at once, a strange pressure cooker of boasts and doubts that falls out of step with its deftly sequenced and thematically tight predecessors. But these are the sounds at the precipice of change -- perhaps it's fitting that Tyler can't quite package himself as neatly this time around.
