Earl Sweatshirt / MIKE / Surf Gang
Pompeii // Utility
10K
You may adore, as I do, rappers/lexicon-twisters Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE’s way with a sound and a story. Both artists have been doing this for a minute (MIKE for a decade at this point, Earl since the dawn-of-the-2010s heyday of Odd Future), and each have a knack for writing down and talking up the long game, stretching their tale-telling as one would fresh taffy. With Earl as friend and mentor to MIKE, each garbled locution they’ve made on their own separate recordings can be viewed as a continuance of brotherhood and gain, if you so choose. But a double-LP concept album, per se, that touches on chaos theory and Waugh-like inevitable decline? Nah. Even together as they are here, I would’ve figured each of these sturdy hip-hop greats for something ruminatively streetwise, beautifully introspective, but blunt and free-form.
Welcome to the sonic stage the New York multimedia collective Surf Gang, a team of early-2020s aesthetes and entrepreneurs who know how to stretch a point and build a universe around their clientele based on plentiful snippet-sampling—think Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album made distortion-heavy just yesterday—and a brand of post-trap that feels as transient as a dirty bus station. What this Gang does for MIKE and Earl on Pompeii // Utility is give each of the sing-songy speakers richly emollient yet still spare cloud-rap sound beds to play upon, so that their individual blackly comic takes on the chaotic fall of mankind in the 21st century comes together in a show of unity, utility, and futility. And humor.
Both rappers stuff their individual sides of the hour-plus-long, 33-track collection with their own ideas, and they technically only come together twice—on MIKE’s “Kirkland,” filled with Earl’s fast improvs, and on the smooth floetry of Earl’s “Leadbelly,” featuring a pinballing MIKE—yet together they create one big, undignified Disney World with Surf Gang as their messy tour guides. Enjoy the trip.
