5 new releases we love: FKA Twigs transfigures, Gang Starr throws it back, and more
Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom Pt. 2
[P.W. Elverum & Sun, November 8]
Phil Elverum—a.k.a. Mount Eerie and, before that, The Microphones—has had a brutal few years, and has poured his experiences into direct, profound songs. First came 2017’s A Crow Looked At Me, a gutting album detailing Elverum’s grief over the loss of his wife, who died of cancer in 2016. Elverum found love again not too much later, marrying actress Michelle Williams in 2018 but splitting less than a year later; that experience colors Lost Wisdom Pt. 2 pretty directly: “Today the tabloids told the world you separated me / My phone began dinging more than usual / It was just like the day they found out we’d gotten married.” This one is more about longing and regret than death, but it’s far from easy listening. To make it go down smoother, Elverum recruited his old friend Julie Doiron, the fantastic singer-songwriter with whom he collaborated on the first Lost Wisdom record a decade ago. Together they spin sorrow into magic, frequently using no more than their voices and one lonely acoustic guitar. [Josh Modell]
Earl Sweatshirt, Feet Of Clay
[Tan Cressida/Warner, November 1]
If you did not fuck with Some Rap Songs, Earl Sweatshirt’s long-awaited 2018 LP that buried his dazzling technical prowess beneath a fog of minimalist, ambient hip-hop, well, you will probably extremely not fuck with the new Feet Of Clay. Shorter, darker, and even less interested in appealing to the “FREE EARL” crowd, the 15-minute EP finds the emcee receding further still into his own mind, spitting characteristically dense bars over beats few other rappers would dare touch. (The accordion loop of “East” has already gone down in infamy, but “OD” sounds like a radio caught between stations.) If you’ve got the ears for it, though, these are verses unlike any in hip-hop, grieving dead family members and each melting glacier, shouting out the ’04 Pistons and going bar for bar with Mach-Hommy. “The quality thorough, ill / It’s all I could spill / There’s more I could do,” he raps at the album’s close, and, as always, we believe him. [Clayton Purdom]