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Michael Kiwanuka
Feelings on display … Michael Kiwanuka. Photograph: Phil Sharp
Feelings on display … Michael Kiwanuka. Photograph: Phil Sharp

Michael Kiwanuka: Love & Hate review – soul-searching with the tang of authenticity

This article is more than 7 years old

Kiwanuka has found a troubled, compelling voice with an emotional honesty and stately self-assurance that shows other post-Drake melancholics up as imitators

Three months ago, the first single from Michael Kiwanuka’s second album was released. Called Black Man in a White World, it opened like an old field recording of a work song, or as Kiwanuka himself put it, “slave music”: handclaps and a distorted a capella vocal eventually giving way to beautifully orchestrated, but agitated-sounding funk, backing vocals repeating the title over and over again, as if determinedly hammering a point home. It was a pretty strident comeback, but, in one sense, not entirely surprising. For reasons that scarcely need pointing out, 2016 has been a year in which black artists have felt impelled to make music dwelling on the subjects of race and identity, a state of affairs exacerbated in Kiwanuka’s case by his curious position within British pop. Born in Muswell Hill to Ugandan parents, he works in a black musical tradition – a brand of folk-influenced soul indebted to Bill Withers and Terry Callier – but, as he recently pointed out: “there’s not that many black people at my gigs”.

Furthermore, you can see why the gestation of Kiwanuka’s second album might have involved a bit of soul-searching regarding his own musical identity. There was a lot to commend on his 2012 debut Home Again but, for a confessional singer-songwriter, the man behind it remained an oddly spectral figure. It seemed primarily concerned with a kind of musical sleight of hand, deploying every trick going – up to and including the kind of jazz flute that these days makes you think not of Rahsaan Roland Kirk but Ron Burgundy sticking his head under the door of a lavatory cubicle – to convince its audience that they were actually listening to a long-lost release from 45 years ago: the shadow of its influences hung so long over the album that its actual author was a bit difficult to discern.

If Kiwanuka previously seemed a little too unassuming for his own good, then Black Man in a White World appeared to suggest a new-found conviction and assurance. It’s a feeling borne out by the rest of Love & Hate. It takes confidence to open an album with a song that lasts over 10 minutes, the first five of them entirely instrumental. That confidence could obviously be wildly misplaced – a five minute instrumental overture replete with strings, wordless backing vocals and melancholy slide guitar that sounds not unlike the work of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour could be an exercise in terrible hollow pomposity. But instead, Cold Little Heart proceeds with a stately assurance: the moment where the song suddenly pulls into focus is really thrilling. Father’s Son, meanwhile, pulls off the trick in reverse. Less than halfway through the song, the rhythm section and the sunlit, jangling guitar figure drop out entirely, never to return: the remaining four minutes of the song feature Kiwanuka’s vocals – pained and doused in effects – playing out against a shifting backdrop of strings, piano and frayed, distorted guitar. The effect is hugely striking: a practising Christian, Kiwanuka has written about his faith before, but they’ve never sounded as troubled and compelling as this. It highlights another of Love & Hate’s strengths: however soul-searching the lyrics get – and there are a lot of songs here about being wracked with doubt, or incapable to commit – they never feel like the kind of drizzly post-Drake self-absorption that currently seems to be the lingua franca of chart pop. If Lukas Graham or that dreadful character who took a pill in Ibiza seem like people going through the motions because melancholy solipsism sells, there’s a real tang of authenticity about the feelings on display here. “I can’t stand myself … I’ve been ashamed all my life,” sings Kiwanuka on Cold Little Heart, and you believe him, not least because of the understated warmth and the conversational quality of his vocals.

There are moments when Kiwanuka still seems transfixed by the past. The suspicion that someone – either the singer, or one of Love & Hate’s producers, a line-up that includes Dangermouse, London-based hip-hop producer Inflo and former Bees frontman Paul Butler, who worked on Home Again – has been spending a lot of time listening to Dr John’s early solo albums is hard to avoid. Echoes of their strange, loose atmosphere are everywhere in Love & Hate’s sound, which is big on reverb and ragged percussion high in the mix: whether intentionally or not, the backing vocals on Place I Belong sound like a homage to those on Danse Fambeaux, from Dr John’s 1968 debut Gris Gris. But unlike his own debut, Love & Hate never feels like an album screwing its eyes shut and trying to make believe that it’s 1971. The retro affectations are bound up with stuff that sounds very modern: the ambient electronics that open I’ll Never Love; the warped acoustic guitar that drives the title track; the way the sound plays with distortion, suddenly whacking it on Kiwanuka’s vocals at moments of high drama, or slathering it over the guitar on closer The Final Frame until it sounds like it’s short-circuiting. You might even say that Falling weirdly resembles one of Kiwanuka’s old folk-soul heroes had they somehow been exposed to the latterday oeuvre of Radiohead. A beautiful melody, wrapped in gauzy textures, it’s a fantastic song, exquisitely arranged, something Love & Hate is packed with: the work of an artist coming into his own.

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