Albums of the week: Earl Sweatshirt, Mac DeMarco, Wolf Alice, Blake Mills & Pino Palladino

Live Laugh Love

Earl Sweatshirt

(Tan Cressida/Warner)

A decade ago, LA rapper Earl Sweatshirt released the bleak I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. An ancillary EP, Solace, was even more desolate. Naming a record Live Laugh Love points to Sweatshirt’s enduringly wry sense of humour, if not some hard-won equanimity too.

The son of an academic and poet, Sweatshirt first came up alongside Frank Ocean, Tyler, the Creator, Syd, and the hip-hop collective Odd Future; of his peers, he has probably had the most left-field career, putting out consistently emotive, eclectic records full of riddling wordplay with little regard for what anyone else sounds like. Voir Dire, his assured 2023 collaboration with producer the Alchemist, was a case in point.

Having become a father in 2021, Sweatshirt might just be in something like a good place. Live Laugh Love opens with the psychedelic, basketball-referencing gsw vs sac, which finds Sweatshirt rapping with an audible grin. These 11 short, impressionistic tracks bristle with off-kilter samples, incidental sounds, and even some shimmering soul grooves. The hazy Tourmaline finds Sweatshirt in an uncharacteristically mellow frame of mind. Throughout, the rapper is still searching, his verses as elliptical as ever, but this record’s brio is palpable. By Kitty Empire

Guitar

Mac DeMarco

(Mac’s Record Label)

Having spent the past couple of years experimenting with the wholly instrumental Five Easy Hot Dogs and the sprawling, 199-song archive dump of One Wayne G, Canadian cult hero Mac DeMarco will surely have given his fans cause to breathe a sigh of relief at the announcement of Guitar. Across its tight, 30-minute run time, the instrument is almost the only foil to DeMarco’s familiar croon; stripped back and intimate, the album artwork of the musician at home opens the door to a gentle record that’s like overhearing someone playing in the next room, unaware of the outside world.

However, if all that sounds like something of a return to character, then Guitar’s concerns are a world away from the freewheeling goofball of old. Opening a pained album of regret and worry, Shining and Sweeter deliver fretful laments on a relationship broken by cheating, while Home walks away from the streets he once knew with their tattered friendships and soiled memories. Terror is one of several tracks that openly fear the future: “I am terrified of dying.” A document of a clearly tortured mind, Guitar’s tender sonics at least act as a soothing hug. By Lisa Wright

The Clearing

Wolf Alice

(Sony) 

Wolf Alice deservedly won best group at the Brit awards in 2022. The big winner that year was Adele, and it’s her producer Greg Kurstin who has the task of helping the London indie rockers reduce themselves here, after the band felt there was too much detail on their excellent last album, Blue Weekend. The result, The Clearing, is a lovely listen, fizzing with sunny 70s-style piano that’s pregnant with enough idiosyncrasy to avoid simple pastiche. Bloom Baby Bloom is devastatingly good, a roiling, strutting scream at the mirror, yet more playful and poppy than anything else the quartet have released.

Drummer Joel Amey takes the mic for the first time on the motorik, mildly psychy belter White Horses. He does well but it’s frontwoman Ellie Rowsell who impresses throughout. She’s in great voice, less concerned with the fallout from failed relationships than before and instead weighing the importance of self-love, sex, family, music, alcohol and female friendships. You’ll find the map to The Clearing (a metaphor for edging out of the woods of her 20s, it seems) in the beguiling final track The Sofa, a beautifully crafted hymn to accepting with life’s vicissitudes. By Damien Morris

That Wasn’t a Dream

Blake Mills & Pino Palladino

(New Deal/Impulse)

Blake Mills and Pino Palladino are among the most prolific sidemen working today. Bassist Palladino has collaborated with D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and Adele, while producer and multi-instrumentalist Mills has played with everyone from Bob Dylan to Fiona Apple and John Legend. As a duo, Mills and Palladino released their debut album of meandering instrumentals, Notes With Attachments, in 2021, channelling their wide-ranging musical experiences into eight tracks of restless rhythms.

Their follow-up, That Wasn’t a Dream, continues the theme, taking woozy detours through instrumentals that suggest sluggish background listening but ultimately deliver something altogether more unexpected. The opening track Contour sets the tone, with pleasant finger-picked Latin guitar and bass floating over hand percussion before reverb-laden woodwinds susurrate and destabilise the tight-knit composition. Songs such as Somnabulista and Taka revel in this uneasiness, interjecting synths or fractal vocal melodies into otherwise cohesive arrangements, while Heat Sink features a yearning solo from saxophonist Sam Gendel.

Rather than slot seamlessly into the ensemble, as their other work calls for, the pair’s duo project is delightfully strange, yielding tunes that sometimes jar but never fail to hold our attention. By Ammar Kalia

Jazz has a rich history of artists from different disciplines collaborating to produce exciting fusions. Take free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and sitarist Collin Walcott in the 70s global music group Codona, or techno producer Jeff Mills and Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen on 2018’s dubbed-out Tomorrow Comes the Harvest. Quartet LVDF now join this lineage with their propulsive debut.

The group met through a collaborative workshop in Tuscany and is comprised of New Zealand drummer Myele Manzanza, whose releases have included acoustic trio jazz and a collaboration with house DJ Theo Parris; Italian pianist Maria Chiara Argirò, whose solo records veer from neo-classical phrases to synth explorations; British modernist jazz-influenced saxophonist Alex Hitchcock; and Italian electronic experimentalist Michelangelo Scandroglio on bass. Their self-titled EP distils these varying influences into a genre-hopping five tracks.

Silver slips through several metres before settling on a keening melody from Hitchcock, emulating the emotive output of players such as Ben Wendel, while Home plugs into a driving rock groove reminiscent of fusion trio Bad Plus, and Jorge’s Vision channels the intricate piano phrasing of keys player Robert Glasper.

With their name referencing La Via del Ferro, the ancient Italian iron trading route, the group says that, despite hailing from disparate places, “this music became a road that united us”. In their debut, this road gives way to musical twists and turns – making LVDF a group worth following. By Ammar Kalia

Photographs by Juliet Wolf/Mac DeMarco/Rachel Fleminger Hudson/Justin Daashuur Hopkins & Luke Sargent/Ellie Slorick