When Young Fathers won the 2014 Mercury Prize for their debut album Dead, their victory was met with a collective "Who?" from many in the UK music industry -this despite the band having already won the Scottish Album of the Year award a few months earlier for Tape Two, their nine-track 2013 EP.
There was talk afterwards of the Mercury "curse" which has afflicted never-heard-of-again winners such as Speech Debelle and Ms Dynamite (both, you will note, "urban" artists). There were scathing headlines too about the number of albums Young Fathers had actually sold ahead of their win.
Predictably, because bullishness is one of their many virtues, the Edinburgh trio of Alloysious Massaquoi, Graham Hastings and Kayus Bankole were unfazed by any of this. Instead they took off on tour and along the way - in a hotel room in Illinois, in rehearsal rooms in Melbourne, Berlin and London, in their own Leith studio - they recorded this follow-up.
Difficult, dense, uncompromising and belligerently lo-fi - some of the vocals sound like they were recorded on a dictaphone - White Men Are Black Men Too draws on influences as varied as Captain Beefheart, Can and The Fall, comes with a sticker saying "File under Pop and Rock" and has a title which clearly caused the band's management some worries (the press material includes detailed extracts from an email exchange about it).
Of course Young Fathers are notionally a hip hop band, so there are elements to their rackety sonic stew that also recall Public Enemy and, more palpably, politically inspired 1960s proto-rappers The Last Poets. That comparison is particularly obvious on Old Rock'N'Roll, the song which contains the refrain from which the album title is taken. "I'm tired of blaming the white man," Bankole raps. "A black man can play him." Thirty second later, another refrain: "N****r, n****r, n****r."
Don't think there aren't tunes in here, though. Delivered over a wonky keyboard line, Sirens is a pared-back slow jam which deals tangentially with police harassment and the perils of street life when you're young, male and black (Google "Ferguson Missouri" for more on that). Meanwhile, Nest and 27, with their soul and gospel feel, actually come within touching distance of radio-friendly. On this showing, never-heard-of-again is not an option for Young Fathers - nor should it be.
Barry Didcock
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