There should be a deeper relationship between rap and spoken word, adding beats to poetry was always the secret ingredient wasn’t it? But nobody does it, John Cooper Clark who was very close to rap back circa “Chicken Town”. Kate Tempest is closer to close, she is a London rapper with a voice like she wandered out of the east End and with dense, heavily rhymed,. By the second song her chorus goes “One man’s flash of lighting ripping through the air is another’s passing glare, it’s hardly there” and the beats are heavy EDM from producer (who has worked with the likes of Hot Chip) gives her somewhere to pause time after time.
In the NME, Louis Pattison wrote “The result is both a 12-track album and a modern-day London fable: a tale of love, tragedy and redemption as elegantly plotted as The Streets’ ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’. ” and that’s an excellent comparison, certainly there is the deep seated stories exploding and badly, filled with “Stressful times” and haunting backing tracks. The effect is an immediacy and a cleverness which never stops hitting at you, it has the well edit of a Chekhov, the words keep meaning more than they seem to, the telling details like skimmed milk in the fridge.
The sounds are deep, beautiful, haunting and rough, violent images and the stories are working class stories of horror and faith, “Everywhere is monsters. Tits out, wet-mouthed, heads back. Shouting and screaming just to prove they exist” is how the story of Becky opens, she meets a guy in bar, he goes off to a bad drug deal, she becomes a sex worker (“wages suck and rents are outrageous) and the happy ending isn’t at all.A rock opera if you will, sex, drugs, bad deals and a romance steps away from hell for Becky and Pete on top of some great great backing tracks.
You won’t hear this type of stories or these sort of songs anywhere else. A big work.
