(XL/Remote Control)

The return of the king?

Apart from a guest turn on a Blackalicious album, Gil Scott-Heron hasn’t been heard from in years. Many of those years he spent in jail for cocaine possession. Since getting out, he’s been working with XL boss and producer Richard Russell on this comeback album. Russell does a great job of giving the album a backing that’s up-to-date without sounding like it’s on the bandwagon – using either doomy electronica and trip hop or simple instrumentation, like the piano, violin and bass drum under I’ll Take Care Of You or acoustic guitar in I’m New Here. The latter is a cover of the Smog song, its self-deprecating lyrics spoken and sung in Scott-Heron’s worldly and world-weary proto-rapper’s voice, which sounds even more cracked than it did in his heyday. He transmutes it into a bluesy wail on a version of Robert Johnson’s Me And The Devil and New York Is Killing Me, singing the big-city blues with a complex arrangement of handclaps and backing that could have come from Trent Reznor. Another highlight is Your Soul or Mine, which sounds like a dubstep version of Lux Aeterna from Requiem For A Dream. The downside to the album is that it’s less than half an hour long and that half hour contains a lot of chatty interludes and cover songs. It feels like Scott-Heron experimentally dipping his toes in the water when he should be diving straight in, because it’s plain the man can still swim. If this is just the first stage of his comeback, the next one might be a masterpiece.

***½   

JODY MACGREGOR

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