Live Laugh Love
by Earl Sweatshirt

I've enjoyed quite a lot of this wave of east coast, low fi, technically gifted rap albums but aside from Some Rap Songs I'd not found one that I outright loved. With Live Laugh Love, an Earl Sweathirt record has broken through in the same way again and though there is an abundance of carefully crafted beats and lyrics, for me the key element is the sequencing. There's a temptation with these kinds of releases to string all the tracks together for a sense of cohesion and often this has the effect of building a kind of fatigue where I pay less attention to the music, even if it's still good. It's kind of like when a book spends too much time on either description or dialogue and it becomes hard to stay concentrated. Instead, this record has hard breaks between tracks, there's often a short section of spoken word, a quieting of the instrumental or an abrupt change in mood to get you from one moment to the next. Between any adjacent tracks there's a shift in the instrumental, cutting between soul, string or brass elements and changing from sentimental to energetic to relaxed. The same goes for Earl's delivery which can be slow (Tourmaline), confident (Static), low energy (Forge) or borderline unintelligible (Live), he even sounds a bit like Archy Marshall on Well Done. The result is that pretty much everything hits to its full potential. This is high enough already, Earl is still a master of putting together words that just sound great together and moreso than his other 2020s releases he has a lot to say here. The line that sticks out to me is 'I paid the cost and I was repaid' from Heavy Metal, which is such a simple but powerful way to describe getting through really difficult times, his earlier work described these depths and it's great that he raps about different experiences now.

From HoldenM 12/12/2025 16:37 | #312116

Good!