Earl is a progressive fella, he is not complacent. Doris was an unexpectedly satisfying, but a modest achievement of a precocious rapper, who is troubled by both familial and musical conflicts. Familial conflicts were pretty visible in Doris. “Chum” was, as most simply summed up, an honest track. Earl, with all his memory lanes, was “in” that track. The ambiguous split of father, wreckage of a household, void created by the lack of a big brother filled by Tyler, the Creator—these domestic lines were minimally embedded in the track. In “Hive”, he was inebriated, lustful and yet still somehow distant from the context he was in. Musical conflict (and somewhat blatant desire to be “distinct”) was partially visible in Doris. If we analyze the members of Odd Future one by one, it is not hard to pinpoint where Earl’s impulse to produce music lies and it was different from Odd Future’s other members. Domestically descriptive tongue twisters of Earl were both accessible and felt marvelously fresh.
However, the musical distinction was not quite palpably “there” with Doris. Even though the low-hummed, minimalistic beats accompanied by Earl’s languorous, yet here-and-there oozing emotion delivery emanated fragments of brilliance and somewhat idiosyncracy, it was not entirely clear what Earl’s intentions were. Later in an interview with Pitchfork, Earl mentioned this sort of “still-not-there”, incomplete feeling about Doris. I must probably have felt that the incompleteness was an inherent part of that album. That back-and-forth between “Sunday”, “Chum”, “Hive” and brief moments of groove, that is, “Uncle Al” resonated with an incomparable sense of sincerity. I mean, Earl “was” in that album.
I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Out must be feeling good for Earl, since he outspokenly stated that the “doubt” in his delivery in Doris evaporated in this one. However, without the tentative, prone-to-puncture vibe and delivery, this album feels almost numb, monochromatic and more “in line with the rest of the n*ggas”. Don’t misunderstand it: the backbone of Doris, the low-tempo, groovy, self-sustaining beats with Earl’s occasionally blinking-at-Eminem rapping is still present; maybe even more so than in Doris. However, Doris’ achievement cannot be reduced to this sound structure. It was a combination of who Earl is and how he sounds. This album is marked more with how Earl sounds, which is unquestionably a big loss, but not a disastrous one.
Through the second half of “Huey” invades a jazzy, well-rounded beat structure along with a disjointed organ sequence. At these moments, Earl’s prodigious aspect seeps. He has an unorthodox approach towards rap. The incorporation of organs, profusion of them actually, groovy jazz elements (interestingly enough, mostly towards the second half or end of the songs) distinguishes Earl immensely.
“Grief” is one of the most oblivious and stoic-sounding tracks Earl has ever produced. The beats are deeply muffled to the point of non-existence. The erratic rhythm of the beats fused with Earl’s stone cold, ennui-brimming delivery suggests a faraway picture from the relatively persona-driven songs we were used to in Doris. However, towards the end of the track (as an Earl-ian classical move), the track is transmuted into a completely different shape. Some sort of carnivalesque, awkwardly joy-driven keyboards dominate the end of the song, giving a warm valediction to it. I believe that this chilly vibe penetrates into every track and ultimately the general atmosphere of the album.
If I should just stick to a simple, axiological judgment regarding this album, it would be: “it is definitely inferior to Doris, but has a certain, differently construed value to it.” Most of the songs have an addictive beat structure, which are either often overly muffled, embedded so deeply into the background of the song or straight up assertive, structuring the song from the start to finish (“Off Top”, “Faucet”). I believe that, even though it is definitely more-than-average an album, in Earl’s discography, it will very much be overshadowed by Doris.
7.7
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Occasional Album Reviews 