Mirrorland - Earthgang; Review
are an Atlanta based hip hop duo comprised of MC's Johnny Venus and Doctur Dot. They released a number of mixtapes in the first half of this decade building up their profile through features and their association with hip hop and R&B supergroup Spillage Village. After signing to J. Cole's Dreamville label they featured a number of times on the labels compilation record earlier this year and spring-boarded that into their major label debut Mirrorland.
Review By Lavender:
While Earthgang have been on my radar for a while and I've been stopping in to check on their music routinely I made the choice to skip reviewing the records until they dropped something more substantial or popular and ultimately I do wish I had reviewed them. But retrospectively they were mostly the process of a duo finding themselves musically and evolving up to this moment, where they have signed to J. Cole's Dreamville records and got the spotlight on their compilation project earlier this year. So with Mirrorland I was anticipating a commercial breakthrough for the band, which it absolutely has been, but I wasn't sure what to expect critically from the duo. While the record is both bloated in points and features a key flaw, I do think it is the duos best project yet and worth hearing for just about any rap fans.
One of the first things you'll likely hear about Earthgang is comparisons to Outkast as they are a duo from Atlanta and their rapping style very much mirrors Andre 3000, and while they have a long way to go a number of tracks here definitely see the duo working towards it. Starting with the excellent opener LaLa Challenge a classic southern hip hop tune with some rattling bass and jazz samples. The verses are incredibly with animated performances and lyically dense consistently tight flows. The track shows off the talented MC's as it speeds up in the second half and adopts and Outkast style chanted refrain build around a tight half-drum kick for one of the best intros I've heard all year. Top Down is an early Outkast era style tune that is quintessential drop-top Cadillac down an Atlanta street music for sure. Proud Of U is a killer track that sees Young Thug joining the fray for some of the best and wildest performances you'll hear in hip hop all year as the three rappers play off each other amazingly and Thugger one again impresses on a killer guest verse that rounds out one of the best tracks on the album.
Blue Moon is smooth as hell with a killer Doctor Dot verse and some excellent horns in the beat for one of the sharper tracks in the second half of the record. Stuck has a hook that is WAY too obviously biting from Outkast and kind of drags the song down but thankfully once again there is a killer Doctor Dot verse in the second half of the track that makes it all more than worthwhile.
Some of my favorite songs on the entire album however come when the group is dipping their toes into some really outside the box sounds and blending them with their usual style. Up sounds like a Benjamin Clementine rap song with a trap flavored beat that features some traditional African percussion all over the instrumental and performances that come with a brooding energy that really brings the song home. Trippin is a solid track and one of the more R&B inspired on the album. While it is a little bit slow it takes its time developing some worthwhile moments and Kehlani has a pretty solid feature on the tail end that brings the song home. My favorite song on the entire record has to be This Side the kind of track I could have never imagined hearing here but it completely blew me away. The hook is one of the sharpest and catchiest things I've heard all year and the performance is so perfect I'm just really stunned by it. On top of this the instrumental is so stark but perfectly textured and it speaks to the duos creativity that they are willing to step out of hip hops comfort zone like that and with amazing results. Speaking of amazing this thing has a Travis Scott style beat switch-up into a sheer banger in the second half that gives both Dot and Johnny another chance to crush the tun with killer contributions on what is seriously one of the best rap songs I've heard all year.
There is a lot of good on this record but unfortunately it comes with more bad than I think most fans are going to be comfortable with. Bank has a HUGE Lil Wayne influence and suffers a little bit from it. The second half is much better than the first but with the song opening up on back to back verses and a hook that don't do much for me the good parts are very muddled. Tequila is a fiery latin inspired trap song with some Johnny Venus moments I really wish I could forget and a T-Pain feature that I genuinely enjoy, but it sounds so out of place on this track that I seriously suspect it was recorded for a different song and for some reason tacked onto this one.
Swivel is the track that landed on the Revenge Of The Dreamers III tape earlier this year and it's kind of unfortunate that it did because it's one of the most boring songs here and really falls short compared to the rest of the record. Avenue is a completely disjointed mess of a song that sometimes stumbles upon some good moments but they never really last long and it is one of the most poorly assembled songs here.
The record hits a really weird blunder right at the end that I really wish it hadn't. Fields is a tolerable song that has absolutely no business being five minutes long. Even as if the song itself isn't long enough on its own there is a whole minute of silence attatched to the end of this track on the digital version of the album that I suspect is meant to make the final song serve as some kind of hidden track. But in the digital format there really isn't any room for it and I dreaded the awful disruption of pace right at the end of the record every time I listened to it. Finally the closing track Wings which apparently needed an entire minute of silence to introduce it is an honestly underwhelming closer with some great sentimental lyrics but a tame beat and low energy performances in a moment that really could have driven the record home.
One last thing I do have to say about the album overall is that it suffers from a disparity in talent, or at least performance. Doctor Dot is fiery, lyrically on point and delivering with tight flows on almost every song on the record, but I can't tell you how many songs on this record are dragged down, even if a little bit, by an Johnny Venus moment or sometimes an entire verse. This is always a tricky subject with a hip hop group and on a number of tracks here the two work together well and make better tracks as a result of it, but I would be ignoring a big flaw if I overlooked this disparity.
Mirrorland has an incredibly high ceiling and a surprising amount of tunes that reach it, but it also has a runtime that far outlasts what interesting ideas it has and could have been improved immensely with some cuts. The proof of concept is here with some amazing tracks and I fully believe the duo are capable of making something amazing going forward but what we have with Mirrorland is a lot of fun mixed in with a bit of wasted potential. 7/10
