Toward the end of Some Rap Songs the muddy, lofi meditation that Earl Sweatshirt released 11 months ago he lays his parents voices over one another. There's audio of his mother, law professor Cheryl I. Harris, giving a keynote address at the symposium honoring Whiteness As Property, her groundbreaking article from a 1993 issue of the Harvard Law Review; she thanks her friends, colleagues, and son, and the speech, like the music underneath it, is hopeful. Harris voice is intercut with that of Earls father, the poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, reading his Anguish Longer Than Sorrow. That piece includes lines like: For some children/ words like Home/ could not carry any possible meaning. You imagine the competing vocals are supposed to cut against and complicate, but not cancel out one another. It seems cathartic.

Earl had completed this interlude along with most of what would become Rap Songs by the end of 2017, and meant to send the batch to his sometimes-estranged father as a sort of conciliatory gesture. But at the beginning of 2018, the elder Kgositsile died in South Africa, the country that made him poet laureate. Earl flew across the globe to make funeral arrangements, stayed abroad for nearly two months, then returned to Los Angeles to finish the album with a eulogy, recorded drunk and alone in a Mid-City duplex, that's really about the eulogizer. Whatever catharsis he was looking for is effectively drowned out.

Feet of Clay, an EP released without warning last night, is the first full body of work that Earl Sweatshirt has written and recorded since his fathers death. It feels, in many ways, of a piece with the album that preceded it the works share in common many patterns, cadences, and rhyming tics, which are occasionally the driving engines of their songs. But from the opening moment of Clay, there is a new (or rather: reclaimed) toothiness; compared to Rap Songs, Clay sounds like someone finally, desperately poking his head above water, grimacing at what he sees. Feet of Clay does not waste time looking for clean emotional arcs. Like all Earls work, but especially the I Dont Like Shit, I Dont Go Outside from 2015, it disguises itself as a depressive episode while documenting his efforts toward self-improvement and -introspection, rendering them as grimy, thankless processes that take place in cabs, bars, and sweltering kitchens.

Read the original:
Earl Sweatshirt surveys the damage on Feet of Clay - The FADER