Earl
Sweatshirt has been getting progressively weirder and less accessible over the
years. On this last album I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, he did away with hooks and resorted instead to poetic
depressed rambling over gritty and dark beats.
Now
on his latest album, he’s groaning out each bar like it pains him, barely trying
to stay on beat. Not that it's easy to rap over these beats – they’re so glitchy
and jittery that they barely follow a rhythm in some cases, often sounding like
a scratched CD. Every track begins and ends abruptly, lasting little more than
a minute and made up of a single verse. The result is an album of hookless, grooveless,
directionless rough cuts that can barely be classed as songs.
The
first time I listened to this album I hated it. Even though I loved the lead
singles ‘Nowhere2go’ and ‘The Mint’ for their weirdness, a whole album of
abstract tunes was too much. It felt like trying to scale a concrete wall with
nothing to grip onto.
Fortunately,
this is the type of album that proves you need to give things a second chance
sometimes. After listening to this again, I actually enjoyed it. As the rough
samples and off-kilter rhythms become more familiar, it becomes easier to
digest and you can start to lose yourself in the atmosphere of the album. In
fact, it adds to the lyrical theme of the album, which sees Earl confronting
feelings of being lost and muddled as he sinks worryingly deeper into a black
hole of depression. Similarly, Earl’s loose and monotone flow helps to add to
the feeling of being lost of muddled – were he sounding tight and energetic it
wouldn’t have nearly the same impact.
I’ve
since grown to love even the woozier and more disjointed cuts such as ‘Loosie’
and ‘Red Water’. I think ‘Peanut’ may still be a little over my threshold, but otherwise
I no longer mind the lack of conventional songs. There’s a hypnotic way in
which they all feed into each other that gives these jarring tracks a sense of
harmony. The short length of the tracks (and the short length of the album
overall) also helps. Not only does it make it easier to give this record repeat
listens, but it gives this album a fast pace that counteracts Earl’s slow
delivery.
Towards
the end of the album, there’s also a lot of personal meaning to the tracks. ‘Playing
Possum’ sees him including recordings of his mother and father talking, weaving
them together as if having a conversation with each other. ‘Riot!’ meanwhile
features a snippet from a song recorded by his father’s friend – perhaps a
tribute to his father who recently passed away. This helps to give a sense of what
might be the source of Earl’s depression, even if he never goes explicitly into
detail about it.
All
in all, this album is certainly rough around the edges – so rough that listening
to it the first time practically gave me splinters. But this itself helps to
portray Earl’s mental state. Whilst I still love a song with a catchy hook and
a nice groove, this is the type of the album that doesn’t benefit from
conventional songs. An album simply need to be a body of work, and how that
body of work sounds on the whole is what matters.
★★★★☆
TRACK TASTER: