Late last year, Young Fathers announced the arrival of their third album with the release of a track called Lord. It was the stuff of which mainstream leaps are made: a beautiful, careworn piano ballad with quasi-religious lyrics (“Lord don’t pay me no mind … this is my cross to bear”) that swelled into a huge, gospel-influenced chorus. You could imagine it being belted out in painfully earnest style by some young hopeful during The X Factor semi-finals.
Or at least, you could have done, had it not been for the fact that the song’s production seemed specifically designed to give people nightmares. The piano behind the lead vocal jangled out of tune and fought for space with an ominous electronic hum, bursts of sampled vocals sounded like nothing so much as a wailing car alarm, a guitar grumbled and shrieked with feedback, the rhythm track sounded as if it was being banged out on the side of a skip, and what might loosely be termed a string arrangement largely consisted of unsettling scratching and scraping.
It’s as good a calling card as any for Cocoa Sugar, an album that apparently rose out of a concerted effort on the part of the Edinburgh trio to make more “normal”, “linear” music in the wake of their debut, Dead – an eclectic, claustrophobic and Mercury prize-winning album in the “alternative hip-hop” ballpark – and its abrasive successor White Men Are Black Men Too, decorated with krautrock influences, ultra-primitive drum machines and trebly guitars. As it turned out, their concerted effort was doomed: “I didn’t think that this whole ‘wanting to be more normal’ thing was going to work. It was mission impossible,” the band’s Kayus Bankole said last month. And indeed there are moments on Cocoa Sugar when it appears to have been abandoned altogether, featuring tracks that forgo tunes and instead set their controls for the heart of darkness: the teeming paranoia of Toy, the horrible cocktail of warp-speed rapping and wilfully irritating falsetto chorus on Turn, the punishing four minutes of needling electronics and screamed backing vocals that constitute Wow, its sound mirroring its bleak view of society (“What a time to be alive – I’m going to put myself first”).
These are certainly bracing – in Turn’s case, enough to make you wonder if you’d ever want to listen to it again – but Cocoa Sugar’s most impressive moments come when ostensibly chart-friendly melodies crash against prickly, experimental music. On the opener See How, the tune is dislocated by the beat: not because the latter is glitchy or awkward or out of time, but because it’s so forceful it feels like someone repeatedly slamming a door in your face. Tremolo douses its vocals in the titular modulating electronic effect, giving them a strange, otherworldly shimmer, while its organ and electronic rhythm backing – muffled and sparse, yet forceful – bears the influence of Suicide’s debut album, never a route that leads directly to the Radio 1 A-list. In My View pits its lovely melody against a dancehall-inspired beat that gradually grows more clattery and oppressive, and a lonely electronic drone that weaves in and out of tune, as though the batteries in whatever’s making it are running out of juice.
The trio are smart enough to keep their experimentation sharp and to the point: the longest track here lasts four minutes, while the shortest – Wire, with its oddly Viz comic-like refrain of “Ooh, ya fucker!” – is over in 100 seconds. The end result is fascinating and forbidding in equal measure, and there’s clearly an argument that it’s also very timely: twisted and broken-sounding pop music for a twisted and broken era, replete with villains (the protagonist of In My View, a “greedy bugger”, actively enjoying not just the taste of his foie gras, but the cruelty of its manufacture) and lyrics that appear to swipe at nationalism and toxic masculinity, albeit obliquely. But equally, its strangeness feels less reactionary than internal: not so much the outcome of looking on, horrified, at the world in 2018 and trying to find a soundtrack, than the product of a band who inhabit a world of their own.
This week Alexis listened to
Ali Farka Touré: Ali
Excavated from a 1988 Malian cassette so obscure it doesn’t even turn up on Discogs and unleashed on the internet by a philanthropic fan, this is Touré at his most thrillingly distorted and Zeppelin-esque.
