Live Laugh Love is like a happier version of Some Rap Songs.
Earl has
never sounded this cheery before. You can even hear him smiling as he raps
upbeat bars like ‘I lace my cleats and give em praise’ on opening track ‘gsw
vs sac’. It’s hard to believe this is the rapper who dropped an album titled I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside 10 years ago. The same rapper who sounded so lost and empty on
Some Rap Songs. I’m glad he’s got out of that deep dark hole. And I’m
also glad that the music’s still good.
That can
often be the bittersweet trade-off once a sad musician becomes happy – they
stop making good music. When Earl dropped SICK!, you could hear that he
wasn’t sounding quite as depressed and as a result the beats started to sound a
bit more conventional. It wasn’t a bad record, but it lacked the captivating
rawness and weirdness of Some Rap Songs.
On Live
Laugh Love, he’s back to rapping over warped and rugged samples that sound
like they were extricated from a mossy crate of vinyl he stumbled across in the
woods. Some tracks like ‘Live’ have a beautiful
otherworldly wooziness to them, while others are ugly and almost unlistenable
like ‘gsw vs sac’ (I’m not a fan of that wailing vocal sample), but none of them
are boring.
Earl’s poetry
is meanwhile as dense as before. He’s also using the same loose and lo-fi
delivery as he was in 2018. However, as already mentioned, he sounds cheerier
this time, which gives this album a different vibe to Some Rap Songs. Whereas
he once used his slack delivery to sound lost and sad, here he uses it to sound
chilled and carefree. On ‘Tourmaline’, his inflections even become melodic. I
never thought I’d see Earl venturing into singing, and it’s a side of Earl I’d
like to see him explore more, as it sounds so good!
★★★★☆
TRACK TASTER:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Leave a comment here!