GHOSTPOET - Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam

The juiciest new find in "hip-hop and beyond" to emerge in the first quarter of 2011 is British. Make a note of this name: Obaro Ojimiwe, aka Ghostpoet. He hails from London, with that distinctive afro-cockney accent of his, although he's originally from Coventry, and musically he gravitates around sounds clearly rooted in grime and pre-dubstep UK garage, tempered with a touch of Warp-style electronics and flattened into a fairly minimal, insinuating, reasonably catchy take on the rap song form. It's a backdrop that meshes beautifully with the original timbre of his mcing, which deftly mixes irregular metres, jagged spoken word and half-sung passages. Like some narcoleptic Mike Skinner, or a spaced-out Dizzee Rascal with a microphone in one hand and a hookah in the other.

Ghostpoet is an urban antihero, a small-time poet of the suburbs, a graphic novelist of flow who blends intimacy and irony into an idiom that's both dreamlike and twilit, as is already clear from the adorable title of this debut album: "Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam".

His is not a self-satisfied chronicle of street life, but of the peaceful, everyday struggle to break free from it. His lyrics read like fragments of a reading delivered to a beat in some suburban book café, while outside, muffled and barely audible, you can hear the voices of dealers, police sirens and junkies on the run. Self-awareness begins right there, and it's a private matter, one in which melancholy takes on a sardonic tinge of humour.

Ghost calibrates his minimalist poetics across ten tracks that swing between a dubstep humus ("One Twos/Run Run Run", "Us Against Whatever", "Cash And Carry Me Home"), hip-hop filtered through early-period Antipop Consortium, as in the groovy "Finished I Ain't" and "I Just Don't Know" (with a chorus that sounds like one long yawn), grime and glitch ("Longing For The Night"), and the lurching electronic breathlessness of "Gaaasp". Overall it's a somewhat monochrome style of songwriting, cracked here and there by a few interesting digressions, some pointing toward the future, like the evanescent pop of the memorable "Survive It" or the crossover between rap and college-rock, somewhat in the vein of Why? and Sage Francis, on "Liiines".

The images conjured up by Ghostpoet recall the still, disorienting shots of a Jim Jarmusch film shot amid gloomy British exteriors and interiors. And if he keeps to these premises (and promises), we'll have plenty to delight in from him in the future too.

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05/04/2011