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Kendrick Lamar
Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers
CD/LP/DL OUT NOW
Bringing it all back home, Kendrick Lamar’s fifth album captures the claustrophobia of the plague years and the struggle to find your own salvation whilst extrapolating the trauma of the black experience through the four walls of the pandemic family experience.
Musically a wildly eclectic album that switches from electronic sketches to brilliant tension dealing jazz piano drapes, moody Marvin Gaye sonorous strings, moments of classic rap pop, sparse soundscapes but always with the distinctive dense wordplay and brilliant delivery from the main man creating a compelling work that sees hip hop’s most creative main player take a creative swerve that is breathtaking.
On his fifth album, Kendrick retreats from the limelight and turns deep into himself whilst highlighting his own insecurities and beliefs. It’s not always a comfortable listen with some jarring imagery and stark wordplay but it’s never short of genius delivery and stunning and ambitious musical twists and turns providing the backdrops for the multi faceted delivery which is as which is as exquisite and multi faceted as ever.
Five years after his last album, Damn, which was showered with praise and even won a Pulitzer Prize for its stunning wordplay and vivid focused storytelling, the hip hop game changer has returned with another heart on the sleeve work that pushes the narrative and soundtrack into all sorts of stunning directions.
Played out over a sophisticated yet sparse series of soundscapes that veer from staccato rhythms to lush strings like on the orchestral and dark piano driven Crown to classic piano jazz, this is an album that takes chances and is immersed in musical adventure and classic sounds that breaks barriers in its supreme effort to make the big statement.
There is no let-up – and the creativity in just one track can be compulsively multi layered. The rhythms are sparse and compulsive or scratchy and impatient and the accompanying sounds and musical soundscapes are not designed for hip easy listening and yet are draped in soundtrack washes with the moody strings never too far away creating a sense of sumptuous dislocation like classic Massive Attack as the culture and sounds swirls reflect the confusion of these modern times.
In the guise of his latest character creation, Oklama, Kendrick deals with the societal issues within the black community whilst also dealing with the new chaotic impatient changing world out there. A world of the great twitter debates of these fractious times from the demonic tension of these modern times to black lives matter to the music biz, #metoo, capitalism, COVID, inner city tensions and the barrage of opinions and issues that shot their way into everyday 2022 life.
Cuts like Purple Heartsdeal with the hard work of love with a guest spot by Ghostface Killah, Mother I Sober features the stunning blues stained voice of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons in its chorus in a powerful deep dive into the troubled soul of the narrator that processes familial violence whilst berating himself for not being able to protect his mother. An emotional internalising that he masked with money, intoxicants and compulsive infidelity. It’s seering and painfully honest stuff.
The album doesn’t flinch from it’s deeply personal subject matter Auntie Diaries looks at his experience of trans family members and dealing with new realities but its ultimately trying to make sense of himself and confronting his own demons whilst trying to save his soul that makes for this intriguing and epic groundbreaking work. Even this is still a work in progress and there are controversial moments on the album like one cut that features rapper Kodak Black who recently pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a schoolgirl.
The sprawling and immersive work is shaped through a pandemic lens that sees the narrator seek deeper inside his own enigmatic soul. Whilst still effortlessly delivering his dense and complex words from his many voices across the album and sometimes within a track he is bringing it all back home to himself.
Those long pandemic months saw most of us dig deep into our souls as the world closed in and you can feel the claustrophobia and chaos of those long four wall months as he attempts to deal with the accelerating tensions of the world out there. The world was still as chaotic as ever and the tumultuous times and chaos of planet earth are dealt with by Kendrick Lamar whilst dealing with the chaos in his own soul in an ambitious and genius album that hopefully finds a redemption for the planet and the artist.
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