Good Morning to you! You’re tuned in to One Track At A Time with your regular writer Jacob Braybrooke, and you are right on time for yet another daily track on the blog, given that it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! We finally move into February shortly, as we complete our various ‘First Month Of The Year’ challenges, but one of the albums that really seemed to strike a chord with critics and audiences alike in January was ‘SICK’, the new 10-track mixtape-style LP offering by Chicago-born and Los Angeles-based Hip Hop artist Earl Sweatshirt, who began his rap career as Sly Tendencies in 2008 and later joined the alternative Hip-Hop collective Odd Futures – led by Tyler, The Creator – to cause a name change in 2009. ‘SICK’ had an enigmatic promotional campaign heading in to release, despite a few singles being unveiled prior to release, and it has garnered an impressive score of 86/100 on Metacritic. Kitty Empire wrote that it was “a musically rich reset” in her four-star review for The Guardian, while a perfect review by Marcus Shorter for Consequence In Sound hails it up with “The rapping is impeccable, and the project doesn’t overstay its welcome” in his rave assessment. Sweatshirt has also recently performed a single taken off the ‘SICK’ LP – ‘2010’ – live on ‘The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon’ in the US, and so the appeal of the record isn’t incredibly far outside of the mainstream. One of the singles – ‘Tabula Rasa’ – features the critically acclaimed New York-based duo of Armand Hammer (ELUCID & Billy Woods) who wax poetic lyrics while politely taking their turn above the ethereal Piano melody and some fragmented sampling that create a dense backdrop for their individual truths to lethargically spit over their collective public manifesto. It also comes with a uniquely unpolished music video that finds the three producers make their Lo-Fi magic happen in the recording studio, or – in the case of Woods – grilling some ribs, by the look of it.

“Sick is my humble offering of 10 songs recorded in the wake of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic and its subsequent lockdowns”, Earl Sweatshirt tells the music press, explaining, “Before the virus, I had been working on an album I named after a book I used to read with my mother (‘The People Could Fly’). Once the lockdowns hit, people couldn’t fly anymore. A wise man said art imitates life. People were sick. The People were angry and isolated and restless. I leaned into the chaos ’cause it was apparent that it wasn’t going anywhere. These songs are what happened when I would come up for air”, in his press release for the ‘SICK’ record. In the case of ‘Tabula Rasa’, it is vital to note that this Latin phrase roughly translates to ‘Blank Slate’ in English, and so it is believable that Sweatshirt and his two partners are rapping about how we are all born without any mental knowledge on the ambiguous minimalist rap jam, with the two outfits trading sequences like “This game of telephone massive/I do what I have to with the fragments” that each convey feelings of urgency and calming processes as the rappers reflect on how the dread of the Covid-19 pandemic affected their lyrical musings of truth as the remedy for the problems that arise. Challenging lyrics like “I have to write to find balance” and “I watch re-runs in the dark, fingers and lips glistening” also simplify the matters of mental health issues and how we find our humanity through mundane tasks that we still enjoy doing, like how “I made chicken late night in my boxers/Burning up the kitchen” nearly ends the final verse on a slightly witty note and how the small details of this action convey something more profound about how we treat ourselves to small luxuries when we’re all alone to remind ourselves of how important that we are. While there’s a lot that we could discuss lyrically, the instrumentation is noticeably more restrained and subdued. The sampling is psychedelic and smart, with mere teasers of voice clips and broken-sounding Vinyl cracks that briefly divert the groove away from the scattered, soulful sample of a 70’s Jazz Club performance setting, giving off the effect that we’re listening to a broken record as the audience. The intricate wordplay is the emphasis of the beat, with the three rappers creating some subtle verses with an interchanged dynamic between the three of them where lessons of finding wisdom and ruminating upon remedies with a grit-laced but positively weighty sense of resolution. Overall, while this is a challenging listen, at first, because the structure is created by a few straightforward stream-of-consciousness rap verses instead of a melodic series of hooks, Sweatshirt still manages to pull off a richly rewarding feel with the cerebral style of production because it feels personal and laidback, and he works towards achieving this dense balance of wordsmith lyricism and minimalist instrumentals by leaning into a hypnotic delivery, rather than simply acting as a purveyor of clear tone.

That’s all that I currently have lined up for you today, and thank you very much for taking the time to look at an interesting piece of new art with me today. I’ll be back tomorrow to bring some music from 2021 back to your attention, and it comes from a London-born singer-songwriter, DJ, radio presenter, model and actress who has run a popular monthly night called ‘Soul Box’ in East London with fashion photographer Dean Chalkley and the British DJ Eddie Piller, who is the founder of Acid Jazz Records.

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