Right then, time to take a break in my busy schedule and get back to this thread, before people think I've abandoned it. Next up:
Kate Tempest –
Let Them Eat Chaos
Grindy may have fooled me here, as I read the genre tags as “poetry”, “spoken word”, but there's also “conscious hip-hop”, so maybe not. The first track is a poem though, and a very good one; she certainly gets your attention and paints a pretty vivid picture with almost no music, while the second track does have musical backing, and I like it a lot. I also like her rap style, which is basically her spoken word style but matched to the rhythms and cadences of the music, which is, I assume, a hard enough thing to do. “Ketamine for Breakfast” has a much punchier, harder edge, with some powerful beats and great piano and (maybe) brass, good backing vocals too. “Europe is Lost” appears to go back to the spoken-word style of the opener – the time 4:18 AM seems to be something of a recurring motif here; she's mentioned it, in various songs, six times that I counted – and now there's some sparse guitar, bass and percussion coming through.
Attended only by what sounds like one keyboard sample (one note I think, or one chord, or maybe two, but not much more), “We Die” is another spoken-word masterpiece. Even when some percussion and bass pumps slowly in it still remains very stripped-down, focussing all the attention on Kate's voice, which is pretty much the centrepiece of everything here. You can't really critque the music, as there's not a lot of it, but man does her vocal delivery and lyrical ability make that not even a problem! “Whoops” goes from a totally unaccompanied spoken word to a bouncy, percussive rap, superb. “Brews” carries on from this, but it's a very short spoken word track, and in fact now I can see that the main characters in some of the songs are all being referred back to – Alicia, Pete, Esther, Gemma - so maybe this can be seen as a concept album of some sort?
There's a great recurring synth line on “Pictures On a Screen”, with an almost sung chorus, very melancholy with a good sense of drama in it, and this basic atmosphere continues into “Perfect Coffee”, which then kicks up near the end of the song before falling back again into its original format. “Grubby” runs on a powerful but muted guitar riff with some sprinkly keyboards and then echoey, punchy percussion while the sense of almost a storm building is palpable on the penultimate track, “Breaks” which then flows into the powerhouse closer that is “Tunnel Vision”.
****, grindy! This album rocks! Big fan now! Thanks!
