Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist
Voir Dire

Release Date: 08/25/2023 | Tracklist

every time i listen to The Earl of Sweatshirt i end up feeling like words are colours or collages or like gaussian blurs of memory, and are impossibly insufficient when it comes to communicating our individual depths of spirit or feeling but also words are God and/or Love and/or The Greatest and Only Proof Against Solipsism We Have. i don't know if The Alchemist is a real person but i do know that putting a high pass filter on a soul beat is always going to trigger "nostalgia" in me -- which is a word that explains a feeling so abstract its different for everybody the way dreaming is different for everybody. oh there we go. Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist along with Mike and Vince Staples (on occasion) make an album that is like sap. it leaks, percolates into gaps: the gap between consciousness and subconscious, night/day, joie de vive/joie de ***-it-all (i don't know the french term for this feeling); playing on life's loading screen as the little percentage bar counts upwards and the flavour text underneath it reads something like "remember you can customise your avatar at any time but doing so in certain ways may prevent certain NPCs from joining your party in future!" anyway so but voir dire means "speak the truth" which i think the truth is often stumbled upon accidentally through the clumsy praxis of speech: making thoughts and feelings real -- tangible -- by plucking them from the obfuscating storm of id and making them into words. rap is such a stream-of-consciousness thing a lot of the time and here the initial confusion of like, "what the *** is Earl saying?" as juxtaposed against the eventual "oh there we go" moment is such a pure distillation of the truth-finding process that listening to this album is like talking to a friend about having this phobia of shadows and then suddenly having an epiphany mid-conversation about this time when you were four years old and you saw a guy's silhouette disintegrating in your bedroom window and reassembling on the carpet by the foot of your bed. that's just the vibe though. if you want to look at it in a different, more effervescent way, last week i went on a little road trip to a nearby beach town and climbed across rock pools and craggy promontories until i got to this hidden beach. the trek was actually pretty painful and scary because i wasn't wearing shoes and the rocks were all striated and sharp like thick quilts made of eroded fossilized bones. but when i got to the beach and let the water ribbon around my ankles and the utter crystalline silence flood my brain i felt like i fit perfectly into the gaps of the world. this album is the beach in this analogy, but it's also very much me hurting my feet on rocks because i forgot my sneakers in the car. i definitely put too much cbd oil in this hazelnut spread sanmbdwich

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3.5 great