Written for the music section of a friend’s streetwear company’s website. Sadly, the company has since changed ownership and the said section was discontinued.
Since his 2016’s EP Six Paths, the inconspicuously named Dave has been forging a reputation for himself as one of the most lyrically dextrous and absorbing rap artists around. His two career highlights in terms of public attention – 2017’s ‘Question Time’ and ‘Funky Friday’, released the following year – proved him an artist capable of rolling out both searing, overtly political protest anthems and finessed, commercially workable radio hits.
The breadth of the South London rapper’s artistic horizons has allowed Dave to proceed in the creation of this, his debut studio album, relatively unbound by typecasting and expectation. The results are astonishing. Psychodrama is a near perfect body of work, almost Dickensian in its social apprehension, its subtlety and its poetic ingenuity. It will be an injustice if it doesn’t win this year’s Mercury Prize.
The album is built around Dave’s interactions with his therapist. Given this narrative, one might expect the album’s 11 tracks to be fundamentally introspective. But, while Dave certainly looks inward for a great deal of Psychodrama, he sees this process as fertile ground for social commentary, confronting the issues that have shaped his psyche up until this point: fame, race, violence, family and life in London. In this vein, the album’s opener ‘Psycho’ fades away with Dave defiantly proclaiming “I ain’t psycho but my life is” – clearly, these therapy sessions are for us as much they are for him.
‘Black’ – the single which, earlier this year, bafflingly provoked outrage amongst certain radio 1 listeners, leading Annie Mac to address the blatant unwillingness of this demographic to even enter into a conversation about race – is the album’s most unambiguously political moment. The enveloping throb of Dave’s piano, the percussion which is integral to so much of this album, is a fitting sonic backdrop for an unsubdued castigation of persisting racial inequalities, cultural appropriation and fragmentary racial reductionism. In the hands of another artist, this tirade, however righteous, might easily have manifested itself as a lecture. This is not the case on ‘Black’, or indeed any other track on Psychodrama. Dave’s phraseology and diction display an artist who is mature and informed while simultaneously impassioned and performatively engrossing.
‘Purple Heart’ follows. A cool down after the intensity and broad-address style of ‘Black’, the track takes the form of a more intimate oration, one to his romantic partner. Laced with double entendre, ‘Purple Heart’ is a show piece of Dave’s ability to take standard hip-hop subject matter and turn it into something which feels palpably shrewder and more inventive.
Although a fundamental constituent of Dave’s artistic makeup, the sheer volume of these Lil Wayne-style double entendres is such that they can occasionally feel crowbarred. For me, this is one of the only drawbacks on Psychodrama. Ultimately however, this is the tiniest of footnotes and, as much as anything, displays the prolificacy of wit within Dave’s penmanship.
instrumentation is undeniably subordinate to the exhibition of Dave’s lyrical prowess on Psychodrama, but there are standout musical moments as well: ‘Location’s’ distant saxophone undertones, the bouncing, thunderclap synth on ‘Disaster’s’ and the tropical beat switch up at the tail end of ‘Screwface Capital’.
Dave’s propensity to choose, not the path of least lyrical resistance but themes challenging to comprehensively address in their entirety, culminates in the much talked about ‘Lesley’ – a track nothing short of a triumph in storytelling. A truly Grand Don’t Come for Free-esque cinematic experience is conjured up with the instrumental, a cacophonous mix of swelling string sections and jangling piano keys, which progress along with Dave’s visceral, quasi-spoken word description of an abusive relationship. So compelling is Dave’s delivery of this heart-wrenching tale, it track feels a great deal shorter than its mammoth 11-minute runtime.
The album closes with ‘Drama’, a poignant message to his currently incarcerated older brother. It’s a conclusion which hammers home one of the overriding themes of Dave’s magnum opus, “the pill I had to swallow wasn’t bitter it was cyanide”: assiduous resilience in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Psychodrama is not a passive listen; Dave grapples at length with the abstract as much with as the concrete but does so without coming across as ostentatious. In fact, the figure Dave cuts throughout these 11 tracks is one of sincerity: unrelentingly grounded and actively self-aware. While musically it is relatively unassuming, his poetry and wit is what propels this album, in my opinion, into the pantheon of all-time great UK hip hop albums.
9/10
Adam Williams - Portfolio 