The Bass Defence League campaigns for mental health. As with everything Big Narstie does, there are serious points in this release wedged next to the broadest comedy, and it’s no coincidence, as we learn from the vivid parody of “BDL Protest” intro skit, that BDL is only a letter away from EDL.
It’s hard to know who to write about when reviewing a new Gorillaz release. According to the official line, the band have shorn their usual guests to focus on the core creative team: vocalist 2D, drummer Russell, guitarist Noodle, and new bassist Ace, borrowed from The Powerpuff Girls.
Sophomore records are never easy, especially when your debut was as acclaimed and beloved as french artist Melody Prochet’s first outing as Melody’s Echo Chamber, and this follow-up has had its fair share of bumps in the road. Prochet first announced Bon Voyage in April last year, on her 30th birthday; a new song was released, and a string of tour dates to go with it. But shortly after, Prochet was hospitalised following a serious accident that left her with broken vertebrae in her neck and spine, and a brain aneurysm.
Would it come as a terrible surprise to learn that this record is highly problematic? Well, duh. Kanye West is the sad clown narrating the global tragicomedy, a troll on an epochal scale, a bundle of contradictory drives all attempting to express themselves to reductio ad absurdum levels. Every time he seems to trip himself up and the world acts as if he's humiliated, it just spurs him on to go “uhuh, you think that's bad?
Comprehensively charting hip hop’s rise from the underground to the mainstream is no mean feat, but that’s exactly what Canadian MC Shad aims to do over four hour-long episodes. Originally shown in the US in 2016, and available in full on Netflix, Hip Hop Evolution has finally reached the British box via Sky Arts.
Their ninth album should please Morcheeba fans. Take the song “Find Another Way”, for example. It rolls in like a haunted breeze, an acoustic/twangy combination preceding front-woman Skye Edwards, one of the sweetest-sounding vocalists in pop, and she still has it.
The venom with which Abiodun Oyewole spits “America is a terrorist”, the key repeated line to “Rain of Terror”, has startling power. The piece is an unashamed diatribe against his nation. Beside him his partner Umar Bin Hassan rhythmically hisses the word “terrorist” again and again while, behind, percussionist Donn Babatunde provides minimal backing on a set of three congas. “Take a black woman, a pregnant black woman, cut her belly open and let the foetus fall out, stomp the baby in the ground.” Oyewole is raging and it feels good.
The opening couplet on Plan B’s new album runs thus: “What the hell have I got to be grateful for?/Can’t be the money as I wasn’t trying to make no more.” One appealing aspect of singer-actor-MC Ben Drew is that he’s spiky, emanating a certain rage. It’s good to see that, after six years away, it’s still there. However, Heaven Before All Hell Breaks Loose, is no Ill Manors, Drew’s 2012 film/album polemic about underclass Britain; instead, steeped in old soul and imaginative production, this is a rip-roaring 21st century pop album, and a very good one.
Where Plan B’s last album in this vein, The Defamation of Strickland Banks, was a concept piece, with a discernible narrative, Heaven… is simply a tight collection of songs. Delivered with aplomb, Drew’s vocals are rich and impressive, somewhere between Otis Redding and Seal, often laid over Memphis-style rhythm & blues boosted on hip hop beats and surrounded by electronic trimmings. The album, written with various contemporary songwriters such as Foy Vance and Kid Harpoon, initially sticks to this formula, which, after all, made him a star, but then he becomes playful, giving us a couple of housey numbers, the steel-band-flavoured “Wait So Long” and Disclosure-ish “Pushin’”. From there he spreads his wings.
Thematically, the lyrics mostly deal with affairs of the heart and his personal belief (eg “Heartbeat” - “I did it just to prove ‘em wrong/Because they said I’d never make anything of myself”) but he still has time for bursts of anti-authoritarian vim, as on the energized, dubsteppy “Guess Again”. Wherever he heads, musically, he appears unstoppable. The astounding “Flesh & Bone” could come from Beyoncé’s superb Lemonade; the title track has a crackling funk; the rave-gospel of “Mercy” bursts with life and ideas. And there’s much more to revel in besides.
Plan B has returned with all flags flying. Whether the general public, whose memory is notoriously short, are ready to welcome him as he deserves, remains to be seen, but his fourth album is a gem, easy to listen to yet full of vibrancy and variety.
Overleaf: Watch the video for "Stranger" by Plan B
The death of “world music” is a wonderfully reassuring thing. That is to say, with every year that passes, it becomes less and less possible for media and consumers to bracket together music from outside the US and Europe as a single thing, and easier and easier for us to understand specific talents and currents within global culture for what they are. Obviously the fact I need to even say this means there's a good way to go. But talents like Baloji, the Congolese-born, Belgian-raised singer-songwriter, are blasting away the simplistic distinctions.
Jack White isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. Whether it’s launching a record player into space to play Carl Sagan’s “A Glorious Dawn”, or embarking on seemingly unlikely collaborations with Beyoncé or hip hop act A Tribe Called Quest, he seems to be a game sort. It’s this ambition (with a small "a" – for "artistic") that we see writ large over Boarding House Reach, his third solo LP and the first he’s released in four years.