Kate Tempest - The Book of Traps and Lessons

The Guardian 80

(American Recordings/Fiction)
Producer Rick Rubin has pared back the effects, giving Tempest’s songs about trying to love and dance through our current crises room to reach out

Kate Tempest’s latest record finds beauty amidst breakdown. The spoken word poet – whose last album, 2016’s Let Them Eat Chaos, was nominated for the Mercury prize – is known for her chest-thumping, rousing statements. But on The Book of Traps and Lessons, she takes a macro view of people (in one breath-catching moment she counts: “7.2 billion humans … 7.3 billion humans …”, and on), before zooming right in to the smallest of intimacies. On Three Sided Coin, she captures the current turbulence of the UK, a nation living “in the mouth of a breaking storm”; and then, quickly, the track unspools into the softer-edged I Trap You, a meditation on a broken-down relationship.

The Guardian 80

(Fiction)

While Kate Tempest’s first two albums– 2014’s Everybody Down and 2016’s Let Them Eat Chaos - were each absorbing and impressive enough to be Mercury-nominated, there was a sense that at times their discordant post-dubstep soundscapes obscured the power of her lyrics. Her third finds Tempest hooking up with Rick Rubin, and the effect is revelatory. Rubin has largely excised the beats and prominent basslines that defined her earlier work, stripping back the songs to their bare bones. Instead, minor chords abound amid muted touches of piano and sombre strings (and, on I Trap You, what might as well be a field recording from an old-fashioned fairground). By the time, six songs in, Too Late turns out to be entirely spoken word, the absence of any backing barely registers.

She’s moved on lyrically too. Where she previously chronicled the hopes and fears of austerity Britain through the lives of various characters, The Book of Traps... is at once both more personal and more optimistic. She addresses the normally unspoken toxic relationship between love and power, most notably on I Trap You, and the shadow of Brexit looms large. And yet amid the bleakness there are regular countervailing flashes of positivity, never more so than on closer People’s Faces, which over five uplifting minutes takes us from lamenting that “my country’s coming apart” to the observation that “there is so much peace to be found in people’s faces”. It’s a touching end to an always thought-provoking record.