Another Wednesday so that means another Kleptones album as part of the OV/ER/LO/AD quad-trilogy.
This week it’s the turn of ER – starting with a startling current quote from cult 1981 British film Babylon – as sampled by Congo Natty and Bob Vylan (‘lady this IS my fucking country’) and then on Urban Clearway (the final version of the City Living demo played previously on the podcast) into Black Uhuru ‘(living in the city there aint no pity’,) it’s a more dubbed out reggae affair, also mashing in footwork/juke beats, breaks, jungle and drum and bass. (I would say it is downtempo, but I know what’s to come so fairly downtempo!).
ER feels like very much a deep comment on 21st century Britain, racial politics and the fact it feels like we are going back in time. It’s a rather doomy listen, but that reflects the seriousness of the times, it’s not yer usual mashup album of current pop bangers! And I’ve said many times before – Black Lives Matter was not just for Summer 2020, Brexit won’t go away and we can’t just keep putting our heads in the sand…
(That is just my personal take, rather than any stated politics in the album…but I feel it expresses a lot of the cognitive dissonance and disquiet a lot of us have been feeling over the last few years. In that sense it’s quite a hard listen; but a worthy one.)
As this is very much an album piece, it’s hard to isolate favourites, but a few include the aforementioned Urban Clearway, the Chocky-like tones of Surface Tension, Hail Storm – that’s Linton Kwesi John with Five Nights of Bleeding (‘madness madness war’‘),
Sufferer’s Time with it’s gregorian ruminations then moving into the classical/Art of Noise style rumination of Hand Span (‘the clocks go forward the clocks go back’) with it’s spoken word about the state of the nation (‘the country of long shadows‘), As I said time is a common thread on this album, with Jacob’s Ladder with it’s reggae vocal (‘time is running and passing‘). I also love the arabic big beat of ‘Streisand Effect’ morphing into a 80’s US power ballad,
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