Kate Tempest - Everybody Down

Kate Tempest

Everybody Down

19 May 2014

Big Dada

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

Of all the best hip hop albums of 2014 (and yes, there were some good ones, and Young Thug didn’t rap any of them), Kate Tempest’s Everybody Down was definitely one of the least expected and least orthodox. English, white, female—three strikes, you’re out, right? How about “no background in hip hop” and “award-winning professional playwright”? Still no cred? Well, it doesn’t matter, because there hasn’t been a grittier and harder-hitting hip hop record to come out of the UK since the glory days of grime a decade ago. Produced by Dan Carey, who has worked with a long list of stellar names (Hot Chip, Franz Ferdinand, La Roux, Lily Allen, Bat for Lashes, Mystery Jets…), Everybody Down doesn’t attempt to mimic any presently existing trends in the greater hip hop world, instead opting for a sound that is a hybrid of retro-electro and a species of lo-fi nu-disco previously unknown to science.

 

Tempest’s subject material deals with the inner emotional lives of the impoverished working class of London. She tells insightful, nuanced, stories about how they struggle with their relationships and economic realities. The jealousy that uneducated men feel about their girlfriend’s careers, the meaningless nights drinking at the discothèque, the drug deals, the dreams whose realization is always just out of reach—all contained within a song-cycle that gives us living, breathing characters that we get to know and empathize with over the course of the album. Perhaps most striking is the fact that Tempest never refers to herself over the album’s twelve tracks. There isn’t a single tired and typical hip hop trope, be it a diss of another MC or a boast about money or cars, to be found anywhere—Tempest shows you how good she is without having to constantly tell you. If you don’t believe me, check out the album’s closer, “Happy End,” and get yourself schooled in what hip hop could be.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger