It’s taken a very long time to ship this debut album. Given occasions, it’s shocking it was made in any respect. Eastbourne-via-London rappers 404 Guild are a quartet however as soon as they had been 5.
Three years in the past, they misplaced their solely feminine member, Mina, often known as Silvertongue. She took her personal life.
Mina was the daughter of Tough and Martina Topley-Hen, co-creators of 1995’s chic, game-changing Maxinquaye LP, and in addition the efficient musical dad and mom of the entire group, whose muttering, eerie aesthetic descends immediately from that report.
Comprehensible, then, that False Daybreak ought to have so melancholy a title, that the band ought to see it as ‘a flag caught within the floor on the finish of an extended darkish street’.
This metaphor – of a quest – suffuses the entire report. It’s a world solely inside itself, one as redolent of the poets of the mystic and the divine as it’s of video video games and fantasy fiction, and it holds collectively as a shocking piece.
They converse in fables. Not as soon as do you’re feeling they’re in over their heads. They may not have meant to evoke John Milton or William Blake – then once more, they could – however both method, they do.
For all its gloom, False Daybreak sparks and flames with fierce invention – and even, simply sometimes, exuberant optimism. By no means extra so than on New Well being, a monitor of gobsmacking originality and energy, in impact a extremely artistic rap outfit imagining how a deep home revision of an archetypal Waterboys anthem would possibly sound.
False Daybreak proves something however; it is a true dawn for a exceptional collective expertise.
False Dawn is out now on Dirty Hit
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