Earl Sweatshirt

I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside

by Chad Jewett

I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, the new album from Los Angeles rapper and Odd Future member Earl Sweatshirt weighs in at a lean thirty minutes. A majority of the record’s ten songs go by in less than three minutes; two of them don’t break 120 seconds. That whittled framework gives the album a sense of focus and concentrated impact – you can listen to all of I Don’t on a trip back and forth to the grocery store. It also means that there isn’t enough spare room to avoid the LP’s compelling, billowing gloom, its shadowy yet biting aura. Compact and athletic in its mood-heavy economy, the album recalls the eerie, zoomed-in dispatches of Method Man’s Tical or even Kanye West’s similarly caustic Yeezus – brief, unblinking variations on a theme. In the case of Sweatshirt’s second major label full-length, there are fleeting motifs of break-ups, existential questions, and depression (a title like “I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside” hints at the album’s seasonal-affective sound), but the unifying thread seems to be that of an artist exploring his gloomier, more haunted sensibilities, working in nimble free-association with the album’s quaking, post-punk and midnight-soul soundscape.

The chipper baseball stadium organ of opener “Huey” figures as the only truly major-key moment (though the gauzy R&B of “AM // Radio” comes close) on an album that is otherwise richly bathed in silhouettes and delivered through gritted teeth. The song is breezy, maintaining the sunnier boom-bap moments of 2013’s grower, Doris, which offered unexpected warmth by pairing Earl’s thick delivery to scratchy, analogue soul. But “Huey” is just about over in a minute-and-forty, and the female voice that announces “And now a formal introduction” does so before the cavernous echoes and slow-drip haze of “Mantra”. The track’s drums thrum like the footfalls of underground sauropods and Earl’s more markedly sharp delivery contrasts dazzlingly with the song’s syrupy billow of dreamy guitars. “Faucet” forwards a similar mood with a sparer arrangement, all corroded bass and spindly guitar as Sweatshirt unwinds more of his singular wordplay: “Last autumn the leaves fell and I raked in a profit”. But the song’s chorus underlines the album’s lost-and-exhausted atmosphere: “And I don’t know why I still call home lately / I hope my phone break, let it ring”. If the album’s sound design is starkly subterranean and noir-ish, the isolation of the LP’s texts are cut to match.

As compelling as Earl’s narratives continue to be – and indeed, he is one of the most original and flexible lyricists of his generation – I Don’t Go Outside is most gripping as a work of sustained ambiance and texture. That the album was almost exclusively produced by Sweatshirt himself (under the moniker randomblackdude) reinforces the comprehensive nature of the album’s mood music. Even the album’s presentation – a stark black cover at the titled accompanied by “An Album By Earl Sweatshirt” – seem designed to emphasize the record’s state as a single, solid piece of work, an angular, melancholy rap novella. The production follows suit. The shaking lows and needling highs of “Grief”, in which the song’s snare clap is piercing enough to clip, echo the song’s lyrical moods (“Focused on my chatter / Ain’t as frantic as my thoughts / Lately I’ve been panicking a lot / Feeling like I’m stranded in a mob”), biting, somber, and coiled. Elsewhere, “Off Top” further underlines Earl’s always intriguing proximity to mid-90s Wu-Tang solo work as the song creates a more punchy, feral take on the clanging pianos and ghostly room-noise of golden era RZA productions. Later, the muffled, spartan rumble of “DNA” (which also trucks in some of RZA’s cobwebbed piano) and “Inside” clear room but nevertheless sound bewitchingly gorgeous beneath Earl’s multi-layered bars.

The real distinguishing fact of the album is that instead of feeling minor in its brevity, the I Don’t Go Outside benefits from its economy and sense of purpose. It’s an impression only strengthened by a vivid closing appearance by Vince Staples, who offered his own terrific mini-album with last year’s Hell Can Wait. Like Earl, Staples benefits from these sorts of dense, deep-impact soundscapes. Taken together, the albums become twin dispatches in a mini-movement of evocative, claustrophobic headphone rap. Ultimately, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside feels like the kind of compact, ultra specific artistic document you keep snugly in your back pocket – the sort of character-rich one-off ripe for obsessive rediscovery a decade from now.

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