Are we poet or are we rapper?…
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Katherine St Asaph: Claustrophobia-of-consciousness; I’m partial to narratives about shelved dreams and circular putters of lives, because the Worst 2014 has followed the Worst 2013 and we all are. Details, remembered sounds mostly, scatter like detritus (the maudlin pub-speaker strings are intentional; “Don’t Tell ‘Em” can’t be, but the chorus threatens, rhythm and melody, to become it, much like the loop threatens to turn into house near the end). I can see why Kate Tempest’s being billed as a rapper, “slam poet” having about as much zeitgeist appeal as “international prune-growers’ conference”; but that route goes, first things first, nowhere. “Circles” is best taken on its own, startling terms.
[8]
Brad Shoup: “Two Happy Mondays go ’round the outside, ’round the outside…”
[6]
Micha Cavaseno: I’m incredibly irritated by the intro because Kate’s flow veers dangerously close to (god save us) Scroobius Pip territory and the purposeful minimalism of the beat is too purposeful to impress. But then around the second verse, with Tempest’s start-stop “No Wait!” trick a mixed bag, you can hear something that kind of sounds like Yuzo Koshiro’s soundtrack to the Streets of Rage video games suddenly bleeding into the mix, like a golden chariot dancing behind this record and vanishing away. That was a cool trick, and there’s tons of little tricks in this song that kind of leave me cold, but that one will do.
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Jonathan Bogart: You have to be saying something really interesting to be a white British person sorta-rapping over such a dull buzz as this.
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Anthony Easton: The Economist wrote a review of a piece Tempest did, declaring it something that teenagers need to listen to –which would be a death knell of her possible hipness, but a mark of her cultural heft — and the establishment bonafides keep piling up. The Ted Hughes Prize, the Royal Shakespeare Company thing, and an interview giving her a platform to talk about everything from growing up in squats to the Iraq War protests to disenfranchisement — it’s sort of like Frank Turner going all apologetic for the right wing after that song about Thatcher. I mean, you know and I know that right/left mean fuck anymore, everyone’s broke, and most people’s optimism wears shark suit cynicism, but you still want something more. This track positions herself as part of the progressive backlash and fails to justify her political and social positions.
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Megan Harrington: Kate Tempest is not a rapper. Every piece ever written about her goes to great pains to foreground her as a spoken word artist, a poet, even a theatrical performer — that is, until the Mercury Prize nominations were announced and now she’s a rapper in addition to all those other things. But she’s not a rapper. There are places where rap and poetry intersect, and these intersections can be confusing for people who like rap but not as much as they like academia (basically the sort of people handing out Mercury Prizes). Calling Kate Tempest a rapper and awarding her poetry as music or publishing an anthology of rap lyrics on a university press does a disservice to both rap and poetry. “Circles” loses the fire of Tempest’s purely spoken word material by adjusting her sense of narrative to a basic beat. Because she’s clearly not as engaged with the production, her normally fiery wordplay is reductive. She fills her song with refrains and it loses both what it shared with rap and what made her work so distinct. As a pop artist, Kate Tempest is a shaggy, hard listen. If this is the direction she intends to take her work, it’s time for her to find a producer who understands the way her stories swirl and funnel and who can mirror that in their tracks, leaving space for her explosive wordplay and building tension along an arc (instead of ellipses, as here). It’s not impossible for these worlds to collide, but they’re a clumsy union on “Circles.”
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Iain Mew: Plot and characterisation are two of the biggest strengths of Kate Tempest’s excellent Everybody Down, and neither of those come through so much on its standalone songs. For “Circles” she doesn’t even bring her best flow either. What it has to compensate is a chorus that sounds great going ’round in circles, and a list of loves that takes — seeing mates succeed, getting a kiss when you feel like shit, getting away with a child travel card on the bus — a deft mix of sentimentality and undercutting it. It also has the best musical moment of the whole album, when a synth version of the “Baker Street” sax solo re-appears as power ballad stand-in then mutates into a dream-like half memory haunting the rest of the verse.
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Thomas Inskeep: So I certainly didn’t expect to be reviewing the winner of the Ted Hughes Prize for contemporary poetry for the Singles Jukebox — but I’m glad I am, because this is an awesome single. I suppose the convenient reference/starting point is The Streets, in that Tempest is telling street stories with beat-driven accompaniment. But there are differences, starting with her being signed to Big Dada/Ninja Tune, which makes it no surprise her music is slightly off-kilter. That makes a myriad of sense since her producer is Dan Carey, who’s produced or mixed the likes of Hot Chip, CSS, Sia, and Bat for Lashes among others. When there was a brief U.S. vogue for albums from poetry slam folks in the early ’90s (Maggie Estep, Reg E. Gaines, et.al.), the reason I always found them lacking is that they were just talking-cum-reciting over some drab music. Tempest, however, has flow; she can rap and rap well, and knows how to ride the rhythm. And being a poet first, her lyrics are great. “Circles” is a superb track, and Tempest is a true discovery.
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Scott Mildenhall: Has Fearne Cotton approved her voice being used on this? It certainly has the requisite Realness, but surely it’s not boring enough for her, an extra-verbose “Born Slippy” that veers intermittently into “Rudebox” territory. The spectacular thing is the lack of spectacle: nothing happens. She’s on a bus, in the pub, drinking tea, then on the bus again. It’s monotony exploding, in stream of conscious if not sound, just thinking, thinking, thinking through the lull.
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Alfred Soto: I got swept into the heady swirl — the tempest if you will; it evokes a track from the Neneh Cherry album released a few months ago. I didn’t pay attention to the lyrics, figuring why disappoint myself?
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