Young Fathers throw everything at the half-hour of Heavy Heavy.
Sometimes they still slip between the cracks.
One of the big problems that an artist could have in the days before an algorithm herded listeners into a single homogenized direction was fitting in, meaning that any unsure radio stations would often ignore you altogether.
Edinburgers (disclaimer: the authenticity of this term is disputed) Young Fathers – Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham ‘G’ Hastings – know all about this phenomenon, their use of overlapping musical styles from soul to hip-hop to pop confusing programmers everywhere, to the extent that they claim the Daddish 6Music is their friend and the urban 1Xtra is apparently not.
They shouldn’t struggle for recognition however, with their first album Dead scooping 2014’s Mercury Prize, after which they featured heavily on the T2 Trainspotting soundtrack and then hoovered up much critical acclaim for 2018’s Cocoa Sugar.
You might reasonably assume that with pluggers finding it hard to niche you taking five years between records might be a problem, but in the interim Hastings has become a young father himself and the trio collectively have regrouped, doubling down on their refusal to compromise.
As a result, Heavy Heavy is a ten song, 32-minute blast through their world, with very little time for contemplation.
Its arrival was long preceded by Geronimo, the skittering MPC beats and ear bending chorus backing words about what to make of life as it becomes more complicated: ‘Got the feeling that I’m caught in a bind/Being a son, brother, uncle, father figure/I gotta survive and provide.’
Bankole himself used the unplanned sabbatical for trips to Ghana and Ethiopia, his exposure to the spontaneous, communal approach to music making there projected via the uplifted, entwined vocal harmonies that give Drum an epic backdrop.
As the process of self-recording and self-producing in a nearby studio went on however, inevitably some of Young Fathers’ focus ended up lying with events closer to home.
To the group’s credit, Heavy Heavy sidesteps the received wisdom that politics is pop-Kryptonite, instead embracing them as an organic part of both life and hence their songwriting fabric.
These demons bare their teeth most on I Saw, a distorted, glam sounding stomp which speaks in Brexit tongues, the emblematically cocky beast singing revealed as, ‘Holier than thou/Sunset gremlin/With a snidey wee smile’.
Fears are buried deeper but also still there on the exuberant opener Rice, on which there’s almost too many ideas vying for airtime; underneath its many threads the words sow caution against damaging a planet for which the clock is ticking inexorably.
The constant noise of brainwaves colliding and producers going wherever they want means there’s never any time to settle.
There are no sequences; here the frosty ambience of Tell Somebody faces off with the sample-heavy and abrasive Shoot Me Down, the brevity and eclecticism often giving things the looser feel of a mixtape.
Not that Young Fathers think any of this is unreasonably odd, explaining recently instead that this anarchy is just in form, ‘the pop music we want to listen to’.
When spontaneity is your default like that the upside is unexpected magic is almost bound to happen. The vocal gymnastics and tribal melodies of Ululation for example stemmed from a visit to the studio by a friend who’d just dropped by, but the result is a tune loaded up with infectious joy.
Like paint dripped on an abstract canvas, Heavy Heavy leaves a lot of meaning to the beholder.
Made by people who believe giving their audience what they know they want before even it does, this is an unfettered headrush that’s ready to be played on anybody’s radio station.
