Let Them Eat Chaos - Kae Tempest (2016)

Ideated from: my best-of-month lists for October over the years. also on the Oct 2016 list: Must have been going thru a rap phase. Swet Shop Boys, clipping., and Vince Staples

Tempest’s masterpiece. The conceit, as you figure out pretty quickly, is that we have separate stories of disconnected people in a storm at 4:18 am. Each has their own struggles and their own outlook, and Tempest nails all of them as we look inside their skulls.

Listen all the way to the end and you get the connection between them, along with some hope that seems notably absent from the first part of the record. The whole thing is a novel set to funky, modern beats, exploring the question that comes in as a motif: “what we gonna do to wake up?”

Tracks I Liked

Ketamine For Breakfast - trying to stay ahead of trauma and excess

Europe Is Lost - modern life is rubbish, but with so much conviction and from so many angles it overwhelms

We Die - A struggle with a lost loved one

Breaks / Tunnel Vision - the benediction, the call to action