THEESatisfaction's Sub Pop debut awE naturalE featured few hooks and choruses, focusing instead on instrumental grooves and the atmospheric flows of Catherine Harris-White and Stasia Irons. The album produced a hit in "QueenS", however, and launched the duo into a career post-Black Up, where they first gained recognition singing with Shabazz Palaces. Their follow-up, EarthEE, once again eschews easy hooks, creating an atmosphere both otherworldly and familiar through its production and stream-of-consciousness verses. The album, at its best, feels like an alluring, slow meditation on the black imagination.
"Said the bird to the water: May I take a sip? May I dip my toes in it?" sings Harris-White in "Prophetic Perfection", the album’s first song. It is a short invitation—or induction—that prepares us for "No GMO", a relaxed, smooth house party track that recalls past offerings like "QueenS". Like the dream hampton-directed video for that song, or the Black Weirdo parties that THEESatisfaction host, "No GMO" exudes a blackness wedded to an exclusive coolness; an invite-only funk that can’t be faked. "The gods were watching our eyes, keep this shit on the low, so clandestine," Stas raps.
The title track, meanwhile, dripping in ankh platitudes via Shabazz Palaces and Porter Ray, is the least intelligent song here. Riddled with borrowed, hotep tropes—"Eritrean queen"; "Kush goddess"; "bitches"; "Nefertiti"—the song pushes simplistic ideas about black women in the service of something that ultimately isn’t that fun or afrocentric. Referencing head wraps, presenting dichotomies like the club vs. literally anywhere else ("Fuck a club, let’s make love in the bathtub"), the song poses as progressive but mostly reinforces gender roles. "My pretty moms was pro-black," though a great line, peddles sexism under the guise of respect for African Queens™.
Most of EarthEE scans like a friend’s spoken word poem read aloud so many times that their sheer conviction makes it stick, mnemonically, to the roof of your mouth. But you can’t simply will catchiness. Something—usually a feeling—needs to hold long after you’ve forgotten the lyrics, and EarthEE makes one think more than feel. Its intelligence—from the interestingly crafted, synthy, intergalactic-sounding beats to the rhymes waxing political and poetic—is unflinching. In terms of evoking deeper sensations, that feel like interstellar, communal prophecy, like Zora Neale Hurston and John Coltrane playing double dutch with Missy Elliott on the moon, there’s not much to grab on to. But perhaps that’s where EarthEE’s seductive energy—the meandering intonations, the sage chants—lies. There’s a power, take it or leave it, in music that functions like psychic holdovers until whatever futuristic soundscape comes next.
