Peter Rizzo, Liam Green and Josef Ayala share their views on Earl Sweatshirt’s new album, Doris.
The long-awaited Earl Sweatshirt comeback album, Doris, leaked this past weekend, promising to answer the question – once and for all – of whether Odd Future’s crowned prince will finally rise to take the rap throne his fans have all but dusted off.
So, after all the hype, interviews and a year of singles, does Earl ascend to greatness with his sophomore disc? Thought Pollution turns to three dudes for the results.
Let’s get the negatives out of the way first. Doris isn’t a masterpiece. It has too many guest verses – while some are great (we’ll get to that later), more than a few are inessential. It gets off to an odd start before Earl Sweatshirt rips shit up and takes control of his own album, but Doris doesn’t have the seamless flow of recent rap landmarks like Kendrick’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city and Kanye’s Yeezus.
However, it’s the first Odd Future-related release since their 2010/2011 heyday that hasn’t disappointed me. Despite having some excellent tracks, Tyler’s Goblin was incredibly juvenile and often insufferably bleak. Most of that album was shock-value bullshit in my opinion, largely due to Tyler’s unrelenting bile-spew. Earl had plenty of appalling stuff in his independent debut, EARL, but he rapped circles around everyone else in OF and had a cockiness and levity that let you know he was largely being tongue-in-cheek.
So, then he was gone, now he’s back. I think he delivered an intermittently good major-label debut. His lyrics and flow are as virtuosic as ever, and he’s changed his focus entirely from over-the-top violent fantasies to something markedly more introspective. The storytelling/commentary on “Hive” and the unflinching self-evaluation on “Burgundy,” “Sunday” and “Chum” are spot-on and emotionally affecting. The tracks that are more straight-up shit-talking, like “Centurion,” “Sasquatch” and “Whoa” (which has Tyler’s first enjoyable appearance on record since Pusha-T’s “Trouble On My Mind“), while occasionally not-that-great, are never boring and set a mood of stoned, claustrophobic dread – there’s a clear DOOM/Madlib influence here.
Overall, while it isn’t the technical knockout I’d hoped for, Doris makes me confident that Earl’s capable of delivering one sometime soon.
If you’ve been paying attention, don’t expect anything on Doris to blow you away. The big game-changing singles – “Hive,” “Chum,” even the old-school OF throwback “Whoa” – were just that, singles. Sadly, they sound like singles for what is a typically sprawling and uneven OF affair.
The good news is it’s still Earl, the crown-prince shouting off the balcony, so there are some surprises here that make the album very good, if not great.
The main problem with Doris is not its tone or its lyrics, but its sequencing. I guarantee that if “Hoarse” was the first track, there’d be a much different conversation about Earl and this album. The song is tight, dark and features Earl’s brilliant wordplay front and center. Doris could have used more songs like this.
I can’t help but feel that Earl should have shipped all these posse tracks to different albums, but understanding his personal need to reconnect with his friends after his year-long exile, I get the reasoning. The sad thing is he’s relegated a lot of great material to an uneven affair. At times, he has brilliant guest features – a great Frank Ocean rap on “Sunday” and everything from rising star Vince Staples shines – but they distract from who everyone wants to hear, Earl. I’m very conscious when I’m not hearing Earl that I could be hearing Earl.
I can’t decide if the album is a failure on Earl’s part, or evidence of a shift affecting non-pop albums since the mid-2000s, when record companies lost a lot of say in the finished product to artists. Sure, Doris isn’t The Blueprint, but do we need this kind of album in the 2010s? No doubt, Doris will demand more listens, but I can’t help but feel like it won’t be one to tell the kids about.
The main, if minor, gripe I have with Doris is the same issue I have with almost all Odd Future releases (except The Internet) – they are lazy with their production.
Earl and friends approach beat-making the same way most kids approach playing with new toys or musical instruments. They find a preset, maybe tweak it a little bit and play a two-to four-note melody. Add in bass, drums and voila! – instant beat. This is done to the point that guest-star productions are almost what saves this album (looking at you, Neptunes/Matt Martian/RZA/BBNG/Tyler, the Creator).
That said, Earl does what he does best – rhyme. His punchlines are outstanding and his references make him a force to be reckoned with. So, while he’s not necessarily the second coming of Yeezus, I believe he has a bright future ahead of him in hip-hop. The best part is he has the attention of so many good producers. If he plays his cards right, his next major-label album could receive the attention that Wolf got, but didn’t necessarily deserve. Earl had a good start here. My advice is simple – don’t get comfortable and rest on your laurels. It’ll pay off in the future. I’d give it a 4 out of 5.