Review Summary: you're never going to get it boy
The whole "post-industrial" schtick has yielded, really, few things that will stick, and it's no secret why: no matter how much tinymixtapes or rym or whoever effusively cite it as an exciting new movement, it's pompous, affected, frequently difficult for the sake of being difficult, better handed in as a first-year music assignment ("dude... irony AND pastiche! i'm getting an A for sure!"). Which is to say it's too academic, too cold, too snobbish. One gets the sense the artists involved -- and Chino Amobi and Arca, for all their strengths, have a lot to answer for here -- are sneering at you, from atop a pedestal they've constructed for themselves and their listeners.
Which instantly sets Babyfather, alias: Dean Blunt, apart. The point of this album is that it's a street-eyes view, which isn't a flash in the pan conceit but a way of using post-industrial as a way of exploring life's unchampioned, grotesque undergrowths with troubling fidelity. His deconstruction of hip-hop, of cultural identity, of grime, of post-colonialism, of arts futility in the face of social forces and indeed the art world itself ("every ****** needs a gimmick"), of what black people are supposed to do -- certainly, they're not supposed to segue the gorgeous Motivation into the hellish Noise reek of "Prolific Daemons". Certainly they're not supposed to call attention to the ambiguity and vagueness of national identification (the refrain of "this makes me proud of British", repeated throughout the album is repeated until it loses all sense or cogency) and they're ***-sure not supposed to draw attention to the blood underneath the sidewalks: "shawty fell in love with a hustler, shawty fell in love with a G" repeats Blunt, but he sounds tired, beaten; the use of the line as a motif illustrates the cyclical nature of trauma, the self-perpetuating failure of the world we live in to accommodate outliers into a system deliberately designed to exclude them. This, of course, is compounded by other motifs; the unmistakable sound of NOS (or worse) being inhaled, the swirling curlicues of smoke emanating from a newly-lit cigarette, with a couple of false takes of the lighter in drunk, or worse, hands.
Hence the conceit, I guess, which is that an underground DJ is offering us an intimate, panoramic -- hell, panoptic -- tour of London, and it is rarely pretty. Lyrics repeat themselves, Field Recordings appear in incongruous places, paranoia and brags reign, but both are delivered in a resigned, hopeless monotone. The shrill, giddy DJ persona might be thrilled at what's found in the voyeurism, but the denizens aren't -- not so much disenfranchised people wanting to be rescued by a saviour on a steed, but just bored, horrifically bored, going through the motions not encoded via DNA but by societal stricture. The vignettes wear out, the prophecy fulfills itself. There's no glamour here, just turgid, lackadaisical beats and drained raps ("oh *** there's that ****** Dean" sounds less a threat than a tragically predetermined foregone conclusion).
Which isn't to say the music is thrilling, because it is. The best way to describe it would be as the kind of album someone in the 2030's would make to try and evoke 2016, in all its weirdness and musical textures, which makes it sound simultaneously futuristic and dated, which is perhaps another way of saying present.
Which makes it an unusually insightful album of its own accord: but then Brexit happened, Trump happened, and political wonks said there was no way of predicting it. But I think Dean knew. The fractured volte-faces, the tonal inconsistencies are intentional, an attempt to capture an epoch short on trust and clemency and high on barely suppressed anger and, more, profound, raging futility. I'm not saying here that Blunt prognosticated any political event, or that he augured a world that looks increasingly like a dystopia: what I will contend is that he captured the feeling first, the malaise and the mundanity and the quietly broiling fury, in 54 difficult, tortured and moving minutes, before these inchoate ideations manifested themselves in toto.
"You're never going to get it" sighs Blunt wistfully, on Motivation, and we still don't; like Trout Mask Replica, I suspect this is an album whose nuances are going to be endlessly dissected after it's too late. But plunging down the rabbit-hole into the alien terrain that is hip-hop without braggadocio or joy, sound collages used as a symphony of anhedonia, the underlying frustration and fury directed at -- well, no-one and everyone -- could well be perceived as a rallying cry of a generation a generation too late. The first truly epochal album of the decade and everyone, including me, missed it; perhaps that says it better than anything. Raise your lighters up and ask him why, sure; just don't expect an easy answer.
