Earl Sweatshirt - Live Laugh Love Review
Earl’s fifth studio album rings with the warmth of a home, guided by irony and fueled with honest sentiment.
“Live, Laugh, Love”, a millennial’s safe-haven phrase that’s presumably hung on a living room wall, takes the name of Earl Sweatshirt’s fifth studio album. The beauty here is that irony and sincerity flourish without one outmeasuring the other. Earl sees his sound back to his early days; Scuzzy and rugged yet so beautifully polished with a soul flow that keeps you wrapped tightly in his soliloquy bars. Live Laugh Love finds Earl unraveling fatherhood, growing up, and most of all, finding his footing in his 30s.
Live Laugh Love most certainly pays homage to its cringey origins, yet the album sees Earl basking in the phrase with good faith. It’s one of those moments where youth seemingly snatches the possibility of you becoming that adult until one day without knowing, you’re that adult. Live Laugh Love embraces Earl’s new setup, one with two children and a wife, and still rings proudly with sounds that got him here in the first place. Upon first listen, you can hear looped echoes of Some Rap Songs and muggy vocals in SICK!. But here, we experience Earl nearly smiling between bars. A slight grin can be snatched between “I just paint pictures, u just chip in on the frame” in the albums intro “gsw vs sac”. The Theravada production on this track oscillates in your ears with a loopy groove and rich soul vocals that never masks Earl’s raps but provides the perfect landscape for them to skate across.
“INFATUATION” gleams with Earl’s reflection on his growth from a child to man, most predominantly in the line “I’m just a man, bars like the rim of the bath, live love and laugh, it’s up like hovercraft”. Earls bows to the sentiment of living, laughing and loving, insomuch that it steadily guides his navigation as man, musician, and father. This track dances with a brightly lit piano and a rapping Earl that understands the consequences that come with life’s aging disposition. To gain great knowledge from life’s progression brings about such wondrous wisdom and painful reflection, two things Earl jots beautifully about in this project.
In a recent interview Sweatshirt spoke about Live Laugh Love standing as one of his most authentic projects yet, and you can feel this. There’s a casual warmth to the project that unwinds the Odd Future spawn, exposing the pieces of himself where his heart beats most. “TOURMALINE” is a sure-fire favorite off the record, reverberating whispers of endearment for his wife and mother of his children. It seems that Earl compares his partner to the spiritually-guiding black tourmaline stone, rapping “She found me on the streets she vowin’ to keep my feet grounded, for my sweet child”. The Theravada beat marries a slow trudging drum with a sepia-sounding guitar cord, playing gorgeously into the velvety tenderness of the track.
There is no “deconstruction” or “devolving” of his sound to escape as something entirely new or fangled. Earl keeps to his script, and you can feel the aging of his work reflecting his most honest self, which is really all he’s ever done. If anything at all, LLL provides a working duality of Earl’s present and past self; We’re harbored by the nostalgic grainy sonics and witty command of language in tracks like “CRISCO” and “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!”. However, within the familiarity Earl brings us closer to his present self as father and husband. Earl raps “2016 I had a dream of my son crawling around on the ceiling, and I had never seen him”, insinuating a vivid portrayal of his (soon to be) child turning his world upside down. And I feel the 360 could also be applied to this project, realizing that we’re receiving a body of work that captures Earl’s growing pains, the gentleness of fatherhood, and the warmth of home.
Live Laugh Love expands outwards from Earl Sweatshirt’s previous projects, yet somehow circles inward achieving a closeness to home that can only reveal his most authentic self. From the existential and honest poeticism of IDLSIDGO to the jazzy ear-candy project Voir Dire, Live Laugh Love takes us home to the front porch steps, and it’s such a meaningful listen.