earl sweatshirt and the alchemist - voir dire

October 19th, 2023.

favorite tracks: vin skully, all the small things, mac duece, sirius blac, geb, free the ruler. i'm stopping myself from just writing the entire album.


this is basically just gonna be me gushing in abstract ways about how much i love this album. this album is so fucking insanely good. i've been listening to the tracklist that released first on gala, not a big fan of it being dropped as an nft for reasons i doubt i need to recap for anyone reading, but it is what it is. the content of this album is so good. i'm trying to find something else to say but that is genuinely just the only place my brain goes when i think of this record. it is so fucking good.



i also really enjoy the songs that released on streaming services, mancala has been on my rotation along with heat check, but the gala tracklist feels a bit more unified to me personally. songs like geb and all the small things feel so integral to my experience with the album and it's hard for me to have them be gone.

i genuinely think these r some of the best alchemist beats i've ever heard. every beat is incredible. they all gel together so perfectly, they have an air of nostalgia to them that i can already tell is gonna make them timeless. all the small things almost feels like if a late 80's coming of age movie was liquified and distilled into a perfectly concentrated 2 minute audio. mac duece has one of the craziest samples i've ever heard in a beat, my mouth was just agape for my entire first listen. sirius blac made me light up instantly when it came on for the first time because i instantly recognized it as an unreleased song earl played on tour. every single song on this album has such a distinct environment to it. they're all so unique but still unified by a feeling that i can only describe as regal. also as a sidenote, this album reminded me a lot of one of my favorite earl verses, his verse from robes by freddie gibbs and madlib. idk, random correlation to make, but that's just one of my favorite verses by earl and i was really happy that so much of this album reminded me of that one particular track.



what i love about this record is just how concise and weighty it is. it's so densely packed, everytime u run a track back u find something new to love about it. it's one of the purest definitions of quality over quantity that i've seen in a while. so many of the songs are so short, but they feel so much longer because of how easily it is to sink into the setting that's laid out in front of u. i genuinely don't know what else to say other than that this album has a crazy spiritual pressure lmao. something about it is just resonating with me so loudly and i don't even know how to begin to explain it better.

earl's site:
https://www.earlsweatshirt.com/
alc's site:
https://alcrecords.com/

maxo - even god has a sense of humor

March 9th, 2023.

favorite tracks: both handed feat. liv.e, onedayatatime feat keiyaA, free!, who gives me breath, like i don't see u feat liv.e


maxo is a pretty unsung hero i feel. he's without fail one of the most consistently strong artists on every track he releases or is featured on. he puts up pretty big numbers too, it's not like no one listens to his shit, but i just never really see folks talk about him. it's a shame because the people that do pretty much all love him.

his last album lil big man is incredibly good. it's a record i listened to pretty consistently throughout like 3 years of my time at high school, would also play it a lot at work when i worked at a boba shop since some of it's pretty lofi and just sets up a really beautiful ambience. the beats are so easy to get lost in, off the cuff the record starts with time and strongside which pull you into a really strong atmosphere. it's not one that's particularly revolutionary, but it's just executed at such a high level where everything feels so cohesive that you can't help but just let it take you. the chops on every track are really simple but so insanely effective, a lot of beautiful piano and vocal chops that feel so perfect alongside each other. i think strongside are the most obvious example of this, the vocals used are hypnotizingly soothing, and it's backed up by such a full sounding instrumental.

even god has a sense of humor carries a lot of those aspects along with it, but in a way that still feels seperate from lil big man. it feels much more cinematic at times. while lil big man feels like it had a veil of fuzz and film grain over it, song's like free! feel clearer, like that veil is being lifted if that makes sense. and i think that's really strong at points of this album. i feel like lil big man carries more of a sense of nostalgia as it carries the past closely in, mind while this record feels more based in the present. obviously that's not the case for every track, there's still a lot of both in both records, i just feel more in the present while listening to even god has a sense of humor.

this record has some incredibly beautiful moments. the afforementioned free! is one of my favorite tracks that maxo has ever put out. it feels so hopeful and triumphant, something that i comes from the way maxo is acknowledging so many issues directly throughout the song. that along with the instrumental is just really cleansing to listen to. the song is a beautiful embodiment of working through things in your life and by doing that being able to declare exactly what you want, which maxo makes the hook of the song, "just tryna be free, tryin not to burn everything i touch". the ending of the track is also a perfect way to let things breathe, letting maxo's writing and the beat both shine.

there's a lot of this on the record. there's a lot of moments where things slowdown, notably the intro of if it was, where the first 40 secondsish are dedicated to ambient wind chimes and maxo reading off spoken word only for the bass to fade in. speaking of the bass, the instruments feels pretty lively at times, i think pretty notably the drums. you can hear subtle tamborines at times, a lot of wind chime type sounds throughout the record, and bass that i think was prolly recorded live on certain tracks? could be wrong, not like i can make good music so take that with a grain of salt lol. but along with those lively sounding instruments they're layered against really cool chords put into reverse and atmospheric reverb, something that sets a pretty unique tone in my opinion. the features also add to every single song without a doubt, and i think are on average the ones that stick out to me the most from the album. pink siifu's contribution is always welcome to any song, both of liv.e's features fit perfectly on their respective tracks and i can't really imagine them without her, keiyaA's feature on onedayatatime fit's perfectly both sonically and within the song's meanings. there's really not much bad to say about the record at all.

i think right now, this album isn't something that resonates with me as strongly as lil big man on a first few listens, but i think it'll defintely be a record that i like more and more as time goes on. also as a sidenote all of the promo going into the album had a really fucking cool aesthetic. everything on maxo's instagram showing off these cast statues was super sick.

if you're a fan of pink siifu, liv.e (who also just dropped a project really recently that you should check out), mike, earl, mavi, navy blue, slauson malone, blu, ovrkast, and maybe saba's few good things project, i really can't find a reason for you to not give the record a listen. i think even just skimming it you're bound to find at least one or two songs you fuck with, and if you skim through his discography as a whole i guarantee you'll find even more.

maxo's site:
https://www.smileformaxo.com/

welcome to the music page!

March 9th, 2023.

hi! this page isn't actually for my own music. i can't really make music at all! but i do really love listening to it and especially finding it. this page is pretty much just exactly the same as the blog but purely dedicated to me talking about music i enjoy and feel like it's important to share.

i'm not gonna be rating music in any way !! saying music is good or bad is lame, would rather just tell you guys what the project is like so you can determine if you'd like it or not

hope i can put u on! ^^