Kanye and Wayne have verses on "Smuckers", the album’s best song. He is friends with Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick (who makes an anonymous appearance on filler track "Run"), and "Find Your Wings" is Tyler’s gentlest song to date, an interlude that’s part quiet storm, part Toro, and completely without pretense or sarcasm. "Pilot" and the title track to me recall none other than Big Black-drum machine-led walls of sound that break down and start up again as Tyler struggles to be heard over the noise. Your mileage may vary, but I find it thrilling-the influence of rock music, while always present in Tyler’s music, is overwhelming here, which creates a Rebirth-ian wrinkle to an album that, to its strength and detriment, mostly recycles three or four similar ideas. Opener "Deathcamp" was allegedly inspired by the Stooges, and it sounds like what would happen if you put Tyler's idea of the Stooges on top of Glassjaw on top of Trash Talk, and, it should go without saying, on top a vintage N.E.R.D. There's still nothing "minimalist" about what Tyler does this tweet just about sums up his approach to this album. Cherry Bomb still features three songs that are longer than six minutes, but the songs transform within themselves, like the jazz Tyler admires, so that they almost feel like three songs in one. Goblin and Wolf were notoriously long, which felt like a betrayal of one of Tyler’s biggest strengths-shotgun blasts of creativity and anguish as opposed to woozy, multi-part dirges that bordered on self-parody.
The best thing Cherry Bomb has going for it is relative brevity. It’s a smart, annoying, obnoxious, creative, and borderline genius tactic from someone still working on reaching his final form. What makes the joke "land," of course, is that the song is really good, a warm-sounding piece of pop music complete with an appearance from the ineffable Charlie Wilson. His idea of a joke is making the lead single to his rap album a Stevie Wonder-inspired bop about an underage relationship.
He’s still occasionally obnoxious and shockingly adolescent for someone almost a quarter-century old (on "Smuckers" he defiantly raps, "Fuck your loud pack, and fuck your Snapchat" with the gusto of Ian MacKaye declaring his devotion to straight edge). Cherry Bomb isn’t exactly a hard left turn from this lane, but it is a quick swerve. His greatest strength has always been world-building, using a synth-heavy blitz of candy-colored jazz chords taken straight (sometimes blatantly so) from the Pharrell handbook.
Cherry Bomb, Tyler’s fourth long-player and third official album, complements his self-professed characteristics to a T, in ways both good and bad.
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