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Kate Tempest Let Them Eat Chaos

Kate Tempest — Let Them Eat Chaos (October 7th, 2016)

   Kate Tempest — Let Them Eat Chaos (October 7th, 2016)  Kate Tempest — Let Them Eat Chaos (October 7th, 2016)★⦿►   Básnířka bez hranic přináší druhé album, které poznenáhlu staví své bohaté obsazení charakterů na pozadí globální krize. Ona není ani tak hudebnice, ale zejména těžká vypravěčka. Kuje mocným kladivem a její album má pro naši dobu bouřlivý ohlas. This London poet and rapper has cred in both camps with a Ted Hughes Award and a Big Dada recording contract.
★⦿►   ‘…joining the visionary poetic tradition of William Blake and TS Eliot with the shape~shifting energy of hip~hop artists such as the Wu~Tang Clan and MF Doom.’ — The Observer ★★★★★
★⦿►   Inside: Lauren Laverne met up with poet, musician and now novelist Kate Tempest to talk society, her debut book The Bricks that Built the Houses, and why she still loves South London.Born: Kate Esther Calvert, 22 December 1985, Brockley, South East London, England
Occupation: Poet, playwright, rapper, recording artist
Location: London, UK
Album release: October 7th, 2016
Record Label: Fiction / Lex Records / Caroline
Duration:     47:37
Tracks:
01 Picture A Vacuum     2:47  
02 Lionmouth Door Knocker     2:45  
03 Ketamine For Breakfast     3:10  
04 Europe Is Lost     5:31  
05 We Die     3:24  
06 Whoops     3:38  
07 Brews     0:48  
08 Don’t Fall In      2:51  
09 Pictures On A Screen      5:06  
10 Perfect Coffee      5:32  
11 Grubby      4:07  
12 Breaks      2:43  
13 Tunnel Vision      5:15
Review
Alex Clark, Sunday 9 October 2016 09.00 BST / Score: *****
⦿►   The poet without borders delivers a second album that places its rich cast of characters against a backdrop of global crisis.
⦿►   “Tempest’s rallying cry is for us to recognise ‘the myth of the individual’, and the damage it has done”.
⦿►   Kate Tempest’s refusal to recognise genre boundaries — her material nimbly regenerates itself into performance poetry, rap~style narratives against a backdrop of electronic music, a novel — might appear at odds with the consistency of her concerns. Mining the streets of south~east London, her voice androgynous and youthful but inflected with the pain of witnessing the world intensely and relentlessly, she captures the desperation — and occasional jubilation — of individual lives and then pulls the focus to reveal what holds us all in place.
⦿►   “Our Earth… our Earth, its blueness soothes the sharp burn in your eyes, its contours remind you of love, that soft roundness, the comfort of ocean and landmass,” she intones on Picture a Vacuum, the opening track of Let Them Eat Chaos, her first album since the Mercury~shortlisted Everybody Down. Her poetry collection Hold Your Own and novel The Bricks that Built the Houses have come in between the two, and can be seen as continuing the story by other means; each of the works showcases commitment to multiple voices, to joining the visionary poetic tradition of William Blake and TS Eliot with the shape~shifting energy of hip~hop artists such as the Wu~Tang Clan and MF Doom.
⦿►   Tempest’s rallying cry is for us to recognise ‘the myth of the individual’, and the damage it has done
⦿►   As its title suggests, Let Them Eat Chaos has to do with what sustains the populace in dark times: the club nights, two~for~one drinks and selfies (“Here’s me outside the palace of me”) that do little to fend off the isolation and fear that strikes in the middle of the night. That time is 4.18am, to be precise, a moment that recurs across tracks, and finds Tempest’s characters locked into flats, bedrooms, kitchens: Esther, a carer, making sandwiches and swigging beer after a long night shift; Zoe, packing her belongings into bin~bags, the grease of Blu~Tack on the woodwork; Bradley, a Mancunian PR who finds himself in London, alienated and depersonalised, trying to reassure himself that reality still exists by making films on his phone. “What’m’I going to do to wake up,” he asks himself, “I know it’s happening, but who is it happening to?”
⦿►   These individual narratives are projected, puppet~style, on to a much larger canvas, in which the global financial crisis, migration, environmental catastrophe and police brutality rotate; “massacres, massacres, new shoes”, as the lyric goes. Tempest’s rallying cry is for us to recognise “the myth of the individual”, and the damage to our collective consciousness it has done; to burst out of our bedrooms and clubs to save ourselves. Her musical restlessness underpins that message, constantly changing tempo and tone, with the feeling that one could be plunged from a lullaby to a piece of savagely fast~paced satire; a clever reference to Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a~Gonna Fall, a brilliantly downbeat sampling of Sister Sledge’s Thinking of You. But perhaps Tempest’s greatest achievement is not to fall prey to the pressure for unnecessary revolution; her work sits more comfortably in the tradition of perfecting the groove, not changing it. That perfection might be illusion, but its pursuit can produce wonderful work, as it has right here.  ⦿►   https://www.theguardian.com/Review
By Bekki Bemrose | first published: 6 Oct 2016 / Score: ★★★★½  
⦿►   Since Kate Tempest’s last record — 2014’s Mercury~nominated Everybody Down — she found the time to put out Hold Your Own, her finest collection of poetry yet, and her debut novel The Bricks That Built The Houses. It’s one of life’s mysteries that this polymath can produce work at breakneck speed across multiple disciplines like poetry, prose, plays and hip hop records and rarely, if ever, strike a bum note. And it’s a gift to the record buying public (if such a thing exists anymore?) that she has found the time to conjure this latest offering, as it offers timely commentary on an increasingly tumultuous world.
⦿►   Let Them Eat Chaos feels immediately darker than its predecessor. The cover alone more than hints at the apocalyptic tone of the record with its depiction of the Earth devastated by violent industry. And whilst Everybody Down was by no means a light a fluffy work, Tempest broadens the focus of her highly articulate and analytical eye and the result is starker as her concerns reach critical level.
⦿►   In the intervening period between her records the UK has had a general election and a referendum on its membership of the European Union. The outcomes were the result of democratic process, but that’s not to say that a large portion of the electorate weren’t left devastated by the respective results. Listening to Europe Is Lost there is little doubt that Tempest falls within the latter group. With astonishing clarity of thought she has created a powerful protest song the likes of which we are rarely produced these days. The song begins by recounting the semi~conscious blinkered way we all conduct our lives on a daily basis, as she wearily raps, “People are dead in their lifetimes/Dazed in the shine of the streets/But look how the traffic keeps moving/The system’s too slick to stop working/Business is good.”
⦿►   The track builds and is dense with all kinds of contemporary horrors including environmental disaster, “The water levels rising! The water levels rising!/The animals, the polar bears, the elephants are dying!/Stop crying. Start buying/But what about the oil spill?/Shh. No one likes a party pooping spoil sport”: to immigration, “But they’re only coming over here to get rich/It’s a sickness/England! England!/Patriotism!”: to glaring double standards and inequality between those with power and those without, “Caught sniffing lines off a prostitute’s prosthetic tits/And it’s back to the House of Lords with slapped wrists/They abduct kids and fuck the heads of dead pigs/But him in a hoodie with a couple of spliffs/Jail him, he’s the criminal.” In lesser hands the breadth of ground she covers in one track could result in a muddled effort, but not here. Tempest yields her talent brutally, yet eloquently, to hold all to account, “Here in the land where nobody gives a fuck.”
⦿►   Musically, on Europe Is Lost, and like most of the tracks on the album, the theme is low key. Moody, economic beats are paired with subtle, yet infectious synth lines that frame and give atmosphere to her tales, never imposing themselves on the most important part of the record; Tempest’s rhymes. Everybody Down had a number of hook heavy dance tracks like the Beigeness and Lonely Daze, and that’s not to say her latest isn’t without the fun stuff either. Whoops is such a track, fit for the clubs, propelled by a restless bouncy beat and a call out chorus. It’s also a great example of Tempest’s ability to flit seamlessly between omniscient narrator and first person narrative.
⦿►   Whoops finds her as a character failing miserably at knocking drugs on the head, and nothing but an off the cuff “Whoops” to explain that they’re “double dropping again”. Its lightheartedness belies the problem of self~medication that Tempest returns to again and again. Ketamine For Breakfast similarly deals with the relentless pull of drug addiction, and in relation to the themes visited on track like Europe Is Lost is it any wonder that with drugs, or otherwise, we try to numb ourselves?
⦿►   But this is Tempest clarion call for everybody to wake up, and she demands it most loudly on the album closer Tunnel Vision. Wha~wha synths and a simple beat soundtrack her call for us all to “love more” to let go of parochial attitudes to environment, immigrants and our own lower classes that are demonised as lazy scroungers. But most importantly it asks for us all to take responsibility for the ills of the world and not to turn a blind eye reminding us, “It was our bombs that started this war and now it rages far away so we dismiss all its victims as strangers” and that “It was our fucking banks that got bailed.”
⦿►   It’s one of the few times on the record that she sounds angry, spitting each lyric ferociously. For the most part she doesn’t need to speak these words in angry tones because her message is deafening, but here her feeling spills out. Let Them Eat Chaos’s hard truths are even more powerful for it. It’s a vital record that’s a blast of clarity in a muddy, chaotic world.  ♣   http://www.musicomh.com/
Also:
By George Meixner / 04 OCTOBER 2016, 14:39 BST / SCORE: 9
⦿►   https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/kate-tempest-let-them-eat-chaos
Label: http://lexprojects.com/
Website: https://www.katetempest.co.uk/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/katetempest
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/katetempest/
MANAGEMENT: TOBY DONNELLY
PRESS:
⦿►   ‘On Let them Eat Chaos, Tempest has cemented herself as a poet/rapper of the highest order, who isn’t happy just make the masses smile, but to challenge and make them think and love too.’ — Drowned in Sound ★★★★
⦿►   Kate Tempest’s follow~up to the dazzling Everybody Down is similarly ambitious in scope, fired by the same compassion and delivered with the same level of energised loquacity. — The Independent ★★★★
⦿►   ‘Let Them Eat Chaos’ is one of the most unique and interesting projects of 2016.’ — Clash Mag ★★★★
⦿►   ‘She forges a mighty hammer and her album has a thunderous resonance for our times.’ — The Line of Best Fit ★★★★
⦿►   Tempest has delivered a compelling, thought~provoking insight into our troubled times. — DIY mag ★★★★
⦿►   ‘Undoubtedly a contender for one of the most important pieces of music released this year, Let Them Eat Chaos dazzles with its linguistically~created, vivid imagery, and ability to evoke overwhelming atmosphere through its sound.’ — The Skinny ★★★★
⦿►   ‘Channelling the vivacity of the Beatnik poets in her hurtling metre and arrestingly forensic imagery, Tempest unravels a modesty in the metaphysics all the more powerful for its naturalism.’ — The 405 ★★★★
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Kate Tempest Let Them Eat Chaos

ALBUM COVERS XI.