Earl Sweatshirt: Doris – review

Earl Sweatshirt's 2010 mixtape Earl was the first major missive from LA rap guttersnipes Odd Future, its shameless chatroom provocation magnified by a blithe, infuriating brilliance. His mum packed him off to school in the middle of the Pacific, a "Free Earl" campaign exploded online, and now he's back, with all his THC wisdom and daddy issues still intact. His main weapon is mixing around phonemically similar words like a pavement hustler's ball-and-cup trick ("new patterns patty-caking with mannequins"), fired over production that ranges from a cellphone-speaker Pharrell symphony on Burgundy, to loping desert blues on Hoarse. Elsewhere he pitches his voice down to a lean-drunk drawl, and neatly picks his way around a non-crooning Frank Ocean, a wittily fiery Tyler, The Creator, and the RZA. This is knockabout punchline rap made into high art, a psychedelic visionquest to the taqueria on a skateboard.