other titles...
- old Win
- Them Waters
- Dial Tones
- Plastic Bag Brain
- ThymeThymeThyme
- Meltdown
- Sloth Trot
- Dorsal Morsel
- MSI musmiD
- 12 Deaf
- Comatose
Ghostpoet
some say I so I say light
Play It Again Sam
industrial beats, sonorous piano lines & hyper-detailed ornamentation provide a backdrop for the rapper’s uncanny lyrical skill at mixing the abstract & the concrete.
the lyrics that come through on this album are as rooted in everyday life as ever, though: from unopened mail to takeaway meals, ghostpoet is never less than completely identifiable. from upbeat opener ‘cold win’, an old-school garage influenced electronic oddity that builds up gradually with cinematic swells of horns & skipping staccato beats to 'dorsal morsel', which develops from a sparse, minimal meditation with gwilym gold's vocals into a 'synth utopia', the songs shapeshift almost imperceptibly, ending up somewhere completely different to where they started. the delicacy of ‘comatose’ winds up as glorious, string-led chamber music. elsewhere, ‘plastic bag brain’, which features tony allen on drums & dave okumu from the invisible on guitar, fuses afro beat guitar riffs & shuffling two-tone rhythms. electronic static, radio signals & beats that crunch like footsteps through snow form the basis for ghostpoet's ruminations on dim sum & noodles on ‘msi musmid’, while ‘12 deaf’ is an aqueous, abstract soundscape. "the whimsical, nursery-rhyme cadences are all but gone, replaced by an observational spirit of reflection" 4/5 - the skinny.