VOIR DIRE
The question of whether you want an MC like Earl Sweatshirt and a producer like The Alchemist to test each other’s limits is on some level an existential one: Like, isn’t the fact that the dreamlike flights of *VOIR DIRE* feel like comfort food a testament to how much they’ve already stretched our conception of hip-hop? Ten years out from his first “real” album (2013’s *Doris*), Earl sounds grateful, fulfilled, and yet no less enigmatic than when he was a kid, holding space for a history of Black diasporic art from Martinican poet Aimé Césaire to the Swazi-Xhosa South African pop legend Miriam Makeba without sacrificing the hermetic quality that made him so appealing in the first place. In Vince Staples, he continues to find the straight-talking foil he needs (“The Caliphate,” “Mancala”), and in Al a producer who can nudge him just a little closer to the hallelujahs he’s either too cool or evasive to embrace (“Mancala”). And at 26 minutes, the whole thing easily asks to be played again.
The surprise album from an elite rapper-producer combo is lean and beautifully crafted. Both make excellent use of each other’s light and shadow.
If anything, Voir Dire is a record that pulls itself apart as it continues, subtly dredging the listener in Earl Sweatshirt's philosophical bile and pause-the-track one-liners: “My brother Sun Ra / We all need you / Godspeed You! Black Emperor,” causes a…
And so, it finally happened. Earl Sweatshirt and the Alchemist have been promising a full-length project with each other for a while now, teasing fans