Staff Reviews

Young Fathers - White Men are Black Men Too

Review by Aidan Reynolds

What do Young Fathers mean to you? Chances are, you’re wrong.»

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The Edinburgh trio return, guns blazing. Scottish-Liberian-Nigerian outfit Young Fathers release the follow-up to their Mercury Prize winning debut album, 'Dead'. The record was conceived during their world tour of 2014, on which the trio found themselves recording anywhere and everywhere they found possible: in a hotel room in Illinois, a rehearsal space in Melbourne, a cellar in Berlin, a photographic studio in London and their "normal hole in the ground basement" in Edinburgh. The album features the Leith Congregational Choir on two tracks. Recommended if you like Massive Attack, Tricky, TV On The Radio, Kate Tempest, Andre 3000 etc. Young Fathers balance darkness and light. The Lo-fi motorik beats and tinny keyboards of the album's duskier moments ('Shame, Feasting'), for example, evoke the claustrophobic synthpunk of Suicide and Pere Ubu, but they melded into warm, uplifting dub ('27', 'Nest') with ease. Elsewhere, 'Old Rock 'n' Roll's' avant-garde take on Southern gospel, an acerbic deconstruction of racial prejudice, contrasts with 'Liberated', a wonderfully warped take on the Stones' classic, stomping R&B sound that passes its choirs through lines of delay pedals and back again. The album is trippy and disorientating and yet always maddeningly catchy.
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