Album Review: Slowthai – Nothing Great About Britain


Nothing Great About Britain



In Dan Hancox book charting the early millennial rise of grime, much of the talk about finding inspiration comes from a desire to make money: the protagonists are mostly young men who’ve grown up in the shadow of Canary Wharf and with capitalism’s fortress looking down on them ,they take a collective vow to invert the rules of who gets rich and how.

Tyrone Frampton doesn’t hail from Bow or Stratford however but Northampton, the sort of large town which has enough urbanity to sprawl but stands largely forgotten amongst the non-metropolitan weeds of Britain’s rustbowl.

As Slowthai he’s made an album that uses it as a backdrop, one that documents his own life along with those of the energetically flushed caricatures imported into his flowing skits, monsters and angels and sometimes just actual people struggling to get by.

You certainly can’t doubt his bottle. Calling your debut album Nothing Great About Britain and then choosing the title-track as your opener might not be deemed that bold: holding up a twisted mirror to the country, namechecking the far right and ending it by calling the Queen a cunt is the decision of a man very likely to end up having to facing down all the wrong sorts of people.

Thankfully for him, Nothing Great About Britain is far sharper than just street life cynically taken out of context to get a few class voyeurs hot. Operating in layers, the gutter to stars metaphors of Doorman puts a stabbing electro punk bassline to lines about haves and have nots and the dead eye of class immobility; it’s the sort of sentiment you’d probably expect to hear on an Idles record, only delivered for an audience who processes their revolutions differently.

Not everything carries that kind of threat: Toaster, an-out-of-yer-face UK garage break with words like a manifesto about being misunderstood, opening up the wound around his brother’s sudden death; ‘Society says slowthai is a danger/Head top rearranger/No love for authorities/They took my bro and that’s robbery’.

Frampton’s delivery is often more fuzzy, imprecise and dominant than you’re used to, refreshingly loose on Gorgeous, heavy-lidded on the downcast Crack, while he willingly plays collaborator with hi-rolling guest star Skepta on the otherwise main stage banger Inglorious.

It’s definitely fitting that where there is a person who gains respect by compassion and not the mis-use of power that figure is female; on Northampton’s Child Frampton’s mum is the hero, a role model depicted not in a landslide of sentiment, but against a starkly autobiographical depiction of temporary homelessness and domestic abuse.

Opening up and showing weakness like that in the sometimes macho world in which urban music lives is a brave choice, one that backs up releasing work called Nothing Great About Britain and parodying the country’s rigid institutions, especially if you see them as being the problem not the solution.



But more importantly it shows that boys and girls everywhere can beat the nowhere trap many see as inevitable, even if they don’t have 10,000 degrees of separation to stare up at from their bedroom window every night.

8/10

(Andy Peterson)


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