Review Summary: This sounds like what it feels like.
A big part of what makes it hard to write music that encapsulates depression and anxiety is the less dramatic parts of it: spending days in one room gripped not necessarily by a visceral angst and terror, but most often by just a vague sense of unease and fatigue. Looking at four walls steadily getting smaller and yet simultaneously becoming the only world you know and can hold securely, because standing up is too much to face all at once. This shouldn't really make for interesting music. Wailing is far too much effort, being flat is a lot easier.
The entirety of the track run is relentlessly claustrophobic, the drums and vocals sound alone over desolate, sometimes indistinct minor keys and production fuzz. Even the visuals brought to the album are absolutely cohesive; there is not a single strong colour in the Grief video, the cover or the booklet’s artwork, everything is static and monochrome.
Earl’s gift is his effortless charisma; his disjointed and punctuated flow can ride confidently over this murky, flat production in a way so many others couldn’t. Writing obsessed solely about everything having gone to *** and how you’re the only real one left in the game shouldn’t have you empathising with the plight of the author, he sounds like a narcissistic burn out, but you can’t help but be carried along in the wave. There’s no grand metaphors and flippant word play, Earl just trudges through a list of things that make him feel like trash and still makes it horribly compelling. Family dying, girls who can’t be trusted, friends who can’t be trusted, institutions that hold him back. No solutions given, just smoke another joint.
At the end of the day, Earl was twenty one years old at the writing of this album and there is a societal expectation for him to ‘get over’ this melancholy and move past it at some point. I hope he does, it would mean some people can, because it’s my twenty eighth birthday today and it sounds just as relatable as four years ago.
