billy woods - GOLLIWOG Review
A slow-moving nightmare of personal fear, political horror and haunted production, Golliwog sees billy woods step fully into the dark.
While no stranger to horror Billy Woods has always had one step planted in the light. While it wasn’t always a heavenly light it was a light nonetheless. Shots of childhood memories, tender moments, and the various other points of comfort in between life's grim absurdities. But Woods is a master of grim absurdity, consistently melding the personal and impersonal with the bleary and surely to create a slow-moving sludge of references metaphors, half-forgotten stories, and doomsday scrolls that have come together to form an incredibly unique and often tender voice. Golliwog steps away from the light fully into the darkness. The light touches of the magical and gothic that littered Wood's words across his previous album now bloom out into a bleary nightmare psychedelia.
While not a horrorcore album in the traditional sense Golliwog carries that genre's key trademarks of grim lyricism and instrumental claustrophobia. Woods has forgone his usual method of single producer per album to call upon a coven of engineers for Golliwog. The effect is substantial, while all are united by that claustrophobic intensity the way each producer captures terror lends the album a variety. Conductor Williams controls a swirl of ringing phones on ‘Star 87’, with ‘Misery’ Kenny Segal rains down blasts of mournful noir sax, and ‘BLK ZMBY’ by Steel Tipped Doves' mixes haunted chamber jazz with creaking boom-bap beats. The sounds carry a haunted quality, while Woods has always had a keen eye for unnerving production on Golliwog it’s downright uncanny. Constantly creaking and draining like they’ve been left to rot, the lethargic tempo not coming from the wheels being slowed by rust.
The production of Woods’ work resembles his rapping, slow and bruised but never necessarily lo-fi or revivalist. The two feeding into each other the tone of the production matching his voice and lyrics. 2022’s Maps offered a shiftin perspective with its tour diary concept, appearing grounded compared to the gothic anxieties of Hiding Places and Aetthiopes. It carried many of the same tensions and anxieties, but more reflection through its wide instrumental palette and introspective lyricism. Golliwog takes many of its lessons and inverts them, blending the personal with the global to thread out a unique tapestry of horror. Wood's voice has shifted alongside it. His distinct rhythm which moves between the conversational and commanding drops the listener's guard so he can twist the knife in. The moments of vulnerability are less bleary-eyed and closer to a nervous breakdown. When anger does appear it's often as pulse-pounding mania.
Perhaps the main way the album differs from the horrorcore tag is in Woods's writing. While it's deeply immersed in horror unlike its Memphis progenitors Woods never revels in it. ‘BLK XMAS’ turns the sight of neighbours robbing an evicted house into a tragic circus of desperation. The rampant paranoia of Woods home being next turns into cascading terror as he's left ‘sat up in my sleep, stifling the scream, that rent got me feelin’ I'm fixin’ to drown’. While Woods has always been vulnerable Golliwog is uncanny in how it turns that vulnerability into skin-crawling terror.
Woods is keen to tie this personal fear to grander implications. Opener ‘Jumpscare’ mixes slices of classic horror imagery, ‘Rabid dog in the yard, car won’t start, ragdoll playing dead’, with grander atrocities. ‘My people fled to the mountains, but it's nowhere the white man won't go’ might be the single line that summarises the album, its terror and fears echoing from the perpetual violence of colonialism that hunts any who try to escape it. Dashes of it appear on ‘Corinthians’ when Woods notes the ‘Twelve Billion USD haunting over the Gaza strip’ across a pulsing John Carpenter synth. Its effects fully emerge on the standout ‘BLk ZMBY’ where post-colonial Africa is transformed into a Romero-style Zombie flick. Woods describes the creatures as they ‘fuckin on hoes’, ‘suckle like baby goats’ and ‘chuckle at computers’ with an exhausted detached misery.
There’s a relentlessness to Golliwog that marks it as Wood's most difficult listen yet. Everything from love on ‘Misery’, weed on ‘Waterproof Mascara’ and teenage hood on ‘Maquiladoras’ is reduced to some form of pacification and despair. Even the guest vocalists that appear only heighten the horror. Bruiser Wolf’s delivery is tormented and eager like a Twilight Zone narrator on speed, EL-P raps as if he’s raging against the beats dying light, and while Woods right-hand man ELUCID may stand tall even he appears enveloped in the murk of Goliwog. A brief light seemingly appears through Yolanda Watson's gorgeous vocals on ‘A Doll Fulla Pins’ as she asks Woods to ‘come to me with your sins’ but as the track fades into ‘Golgotha’ and she's nowhere to be heard her offer seems rejected. There is no light at the end of the tunnel is what Golliwog says, its closer ‘Dislocated’ is more a final whisper from ghosts than any sort of victory.
Golliwog is more than woods focusing on horror. It’s a thesis on it. It’s a near-hour-long essay that confronts the listener with the things that lurk under the bed, that truly haunt the halls. It's not ghosts or demons. It’s the atrocities and systems that still hunt and tear apart those they're designed to exploit. Their bodies are harvested and reduced to either profit or symbols divorced from themselves. It suggests that true horror isn’t slashers but watching your whole history burnt down. Then in the aftermath seeing your likeness now reduced to a children's doll.