Kate Tempest - Let Them Eat Chaos - LP Vinyl

Let Them Eat Chaos is a portmanteau tale of seven young Londoners living on the same street, each awake at the same time in the early hours of the morning during a storm. It is the follow-up to another concept album, the 2014 Mercury prize-nominated Everybody Down, a hard-boiled crime story in which performance poet Kate Tempest fluently reinvented herself as a rapper.<br/>,<br/> The new album reunites her with Everybody Down’s producer, Dan Carey. Its tracks home in on the seven sleepless protagonists, strangers sharing a postcode. Gemma feels trapped by her feckless past in “Ketamine for Breakfast”. Pete stumbles confusedly to his front door after a big night out in “Whoops”. Zoe is packing her belongings in “Perfect Coffee”, forced out of the neighbourhood by gentrification.<br/>,<br/> Carey’s production is tense and bustling, beats locking into a groove like thoughts haunting an insomniac. Meanwhile, Tempest’s sense of drama and lyrical flow are at her best reminiscent of the great US underground rapper Jean Grae.<br/>,<br/> Framing her tales of dissatisfied Londoners is an apocalyptic polemic about individualism and technological alienation, a world of people “staring at screens so we don’t have to see the planet die”. The solution is for everyone to love each other. It is a soggy remedy — but one that serves to highlight the sinewy writing and beat-making that otherwise predominate.

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