Easy Life - Spaceships

Easy Life
Spaceships
2019
Spotify

Easy Life made a bit of a splash at this years SXSW festival and just after they dropped this new mixtape. Employing live instruments and J. Dilla style beats the British group worm their way through R&B and Hip Hop. Their music is light and feels like it has this really warm quality to it. "Sunday" recounts a lazy day with someone you love, but it also feels like a song that has been done to death. There is a very Mac Miller vibe to Early Life, not only in the lead singers vocal, but the whole damn vibe going on here. Mac certainly opened the gate for rappers wanting to be a bit softer while still playing around in the hip hop space. With this in mind it makes it a little tough to separate Easy Life from Miller, let alone the whole British "borrowing" of American style thing. The more I listen to this record the more I dislike it. It comes across as someone playing with hip hop rather than respecting it. It sounds like someone who has heard R&B tracks before but doesn't know the meaning behind him. There is a lot of hype around this band seemingly just based on their image. The lyrics are about as basic as you can find and really delve into very very little. The sound of this album is kind of dangerous becasue if you aren't careful you can begin to think that Easy Life actually came up with this vibe, rather than aggregated it from Frank Ocean, J. DIlla and Mac Miller.

The easy thing to say is "hey these guys are really on to something!", but it all feels like smoke and mirrors. You scratch the surface just a little and it seems hollow and pedantic. Around every corner is another breezy track that is perfectly fine if your listening through one ear. When you really start to dive down and think about Spaceships is when things start to breakdown. I don't mean to sound like a hater or like these boys can't do something in the future, but this particular record is just to derivative. There are too many direct lines you can draw to this music and it doesn't do much to elaborate on those ideas anyway. Easy Life may have been the toast of the town at SXSW, and I can even imagine their live sets being really good, but this album just misses the mark in way too many ways.

3.8 out of 10