Cassandra Cronin on March 23rd, 2017

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“Light is provided through sparks of energy / From the mind that travels in rhyme form / Giving sight to the blind / The dumb are mostly intrigued by the drum / Death only one can save self from”

— Mastah Killah, “Triumph”, Wu Tang Forever (1997)

The interplay between politically charged spoken word and “conscious” music has long been conducted by artists-turned-activists such as the late Gil-Scott Heron, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, the Last Poets and, more recently, Kendrick Lamar, D’Angelo and PJ Harvey, to name a few. To strive in their direction is to open oneself to intense scrutiny, criticism, oppression and oftentimes great adversity. Still, the ability to speak to the most anathemic aspects of our troubled times is first a privilege, requisite of a platform, a powerful message and most importantly people who want to listen and respond.

U.K. poet Kate Tempest has met that challenge with the central goal of exposing modernity for all its excesses, blights and platitudinal promises of happiness for those who work hard and play by the rules. Inside our globalized culture, she warns, is a ticking time bomb — counting down as distance grows between individuals and groups of people, a dangerous detachment that can only be neutralized by unconditional love.

Well, yeah. But is it really that obvious?

During an hour-long set on Tuesday night at the Echoplex that would see an impassioned and sharply focused Tempest perform her 2016 album “Let Them Eat Chaos” in its entirety, the 31-year-old and her three collaborators radiated the kind of joy that can only come from the accomplishment of creating a work that is both strikingly personal and outwardly universal.

Colored by the streetwise jargon of southeast London and cutting social criticism, “Let Them Eat Chaos” pits seven unrelated characters in a world parallel to our own, where problems of poverty, class warfare, gentrification and racism are met with crass consumerism, apathy and the myth of the individual, infinitely replicated as an infallible “palace of me.” Her characters are wrought with social disease and crippled by loneliness, their internal monologues wrapped with the ferocious empathy that undoubtedly launched Kate’s career as a purveyor of spoken word, studio albums, plays and an award-winning novel. A literary listener might think of Yeats, while a hip-hop fan may recall the more serious moments of Wu-Tang Clan’s ’90s canon.

Tempest’s unflinching wordplay was carried by shocks of roaring synth strata, rendered at the fever pitch of drum ’n’ bass and dancehall, contrasted by stretches of sparse, cooled-down electro beats infused with the darker shades of East Coast hip-hop and U.K. grime.

In the final song of the evening, “Tunnel Vision,” Temptest’s narrative had just unleashed the deluge on her seven individuals, forecasting a bleak and unforgiving future for a generation that is “Atomised, thinking we’re engaged when we’re pacified / Staring at the screen so we don’t have to see the planet die.”

For the sake of keeping her audience engaged, she had asked the crowd to refrain from phone use during the show. When this reviewer found her view of the stage completely blocked by a 6-foot fan who had weaved his way to the front of a crowded Echoplex, she hoped that at least he would enjoy the perspective. Yet moments later, the fan’s face became illuminated by a familiar blue light from below. Suddenly, Tempest’s message seemed all the more urgent.

Photos by Jessica Hanley

||| Stream: “Let Them Eat Chaos”