A masterpiece of pain, identity and powerful honesty
RAP
Dave
We’re All Alone in This Together (Neighbourhood)
★★★★★
WHILE Kanye West appears to have let down his fans again today, failing to put his Donda album on streaming services after a listening party last night, all ears ought to turn to another hugely anticipated release. The second album from Streatham rapper David Orobosa Omoregie, known simply as Dave, is his second masterpiece.
The pressure to improve on his debut Psychodrama — a platinum seller which won the Mercury Prize and the
Brit Award for Album of the Year — must have been immense, especially given the shaky foundations that he detailed in the music. The only son at home with a struggling single mother, his idolised older brother serving a life sentence in prison. On the first song, he suggested he was “probably battling with manic depression”.
Here again he’s wrestling all kinds of issues, finding it hard to reconcile the glitzy lifestyle he now enjoys (“My house got wings like my favourite cars”) with the pain that stretches back to the struggle of the immigrant experience as a whole. The opening track, We’re All Alone, makes the contrast clear. At first he’s listing fancy foods over dreamy crooned vocals. Then he switches to his familiar melancholy piano chords and he’s talking about sharing a bed with his mum and pissing himself.
He scraped away at black British culture on Black, the song that he chose for his performance at the 2019 Brits. Here the picture is even bigger. There are tiny race-related details — on Verdansk he uses a “white man’s face” to book an Airbnb — but he zooms way out. On Three Rivers he covers the Windrush generation but also the situation of Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigrants. On System and Lazarus he explores his Nigerian heritage with guest vocals from WizKid and BOJ.
The music, produced by James Blake, Jae5, Kyle Evans and Dave himself, is downbeat, dripping sadness, but the real power is in his words. On Heart Attack the music stops and he keeps going, reeling off shocking personal details and ending with what sounds like his sobbing mother. It’s a breathholding moment and confirms that Dave is the greatest rapper working in Britain today.