★★★★★
Going against the grain is a dangerous art, at least presently. For the nonconformist musician brave enough to buck trendiness, the path can be a difficult and lonely one. On Everybody Down, British spoken word artist and MC Kate Tempest delivers an ambitious album that eschews the traditional confines of rap. Sure, Everybody Down features some hip-hop cues--namely hooks--but the effort is ultimately unorthodox. Tempest portrays a poetic narrative that's incredibly ambitious...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-08-06
★★★★★
Tweet A Real Pick-You-Up At 27, Kate Tempest has achieved more than most 20-somethings could dream of. This award-winning poet has decided to mix her rhyme skills with some break beats and electronica on her debut hip hop album Everybody Down. As a spoken word artist, Tempest is no stranger to a microphone, and her style fits naturally together with the instrumental arrangements present on this LP...
- www.mxdwn.com
2014-05-30
★★★★★
Everybody Down isn't a record to cherry pick your favourite tracks from, it isn't a record to stick on shuffle, it isn't a record to let run in the background while you do something else. It requires, no demands your attention from the very off. To skip through it would be akin to trying to follow a novel by reading pages at random. That's because the debut album from Kate Tempest owes as much to the literary form as it does anything from the music world...
- www.state.ie
2014-06-10
★★★★★
Head here to submit your own review of this album.
There's an abrupt start and we've landed in the middle of a wrap party for some (presumably) East London hipster band. Over by the bar the Nathan Barley-esque Marshall Law is "wanking on about his artwork". Amidst the posers and hangers on two people meet for the first time - Becky, the cynical student who danced in the video and Harry, a shy guy who after a few drinks finds himself detailing all of his future plans to this girl who is...
- www.thefourohfive.com
2014-05-23
★★★★★
Long before she won the Ted Hughes award for poetry last year, south Londoner Kate Tempest was a veteran of open-mic nights. She's returned to hip-hop for her debut album; uncluttered production is courtesy of the versatile Dan "Mr Dan" Carey (Bat for Lashes, Franz Ferdinand). An arts prize judging panel might call Everybody Down a song cycle, but really it's an urgent hip-hop record in which flawed but hopeful characters - international relations graduates, lowlifes, lovers - stumble into...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-05-18
★★★★★
"Will pop ever become political again?" screams The Guardian in just the latest of a long line of articles lamenting the dearth of 21st-century protest music, of pop-cultural responses to a point in time that's seething with issues, from widening inequality to resurgent fundamentalism, extraterritorial land-grabs to the breakdown of democracy...
- www.thelineofbestfit.com
2014-05-20
★★★★★
Frankly, it's strange that more poets - specifically performance poets - don't make the jump from spoken word recitals to full-blown rap. The rhythm's there, as an inherent core element of the art, and the calculated-like-a-serial-killer lexicographical selections point them at a the Wu-Tang-ier end of this chart...
- www.musicomh.com
2014-05-20
★★★★★
Not everyone who saw this 27-year-old's spoken-word theatre show Brand New Ancients (for which she became the youngest-ever winner of the Ted Hughes prize) will be excited by the poet's venture into hip-hop. Likewise, there are hip-hop fans already dismissing the idea of a former Brit-schooler trying her hand at MCing, no matter that Tempest spent her teenage years on the battle-rap circuit. Forget genre, though, and this unique album has much going for it...
- www.theguardian.com
2014-05-16
★★★★★
Over the course of 'Everybody Down''s dozen tracks, rapper Kate Tempest weaves an intricate tale of inter-connected characters, all trying to get by in the world. Each track represents a chapter in the story, and she's got form here - Tempest is a performance poet with a novel being released by Bloomsbury next year...
- www.clashmusic.com
2014-05-16
Loading...
