The Line Is A Curve

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Notwithstanding that, Tempest remains one of our most innovative and thought provoking artists and despite the occasional mis-step, there is plenty enough going on within this album to keep us hooked. Again, it’s a guitar-led piece, albeit this time it’s an acoustic guitar, delicately plucked, that provides the platform for Tempest’s lyrics.

It was followed by something of a left turn in the form of the Rick Rubin produced The Book Of Traps And Lessons; an album that marked a surprising, yet unexpectedly welcome, departure from the visceral intensity of Let Them Eat Chaos. In these more positive moments, Tempest can come across as mawkish; their style has always felt aligned with the heightened emotion of the American slam poetry scene, and This Line Is a Curve brims with chicken-soup-for-the-teenage-soul lyrics. The album attempts to capture what it feels like to be alive today in contemporary Britain, drawing on familiar signifiers and clichés: online lives, multiple jobs, youthful years drowned in pubs. It is like a confessional as they communicate via a distinctive form of rap poetry that only they understand.Covertly, it crept into the rooms, and the anxieties, of a group of neighbours in a London street at 4. C.'s Grian Chatten, Lianne La Havas and Confucius MC, the album is out now via American Recordings / Republic Records and was mastered at Abbey Road by Christian Wright. Their second album, Let Them Eat Chaos will go down as one of the most original albums of this millennium.

Stripped back, with acoustic piano and melancholic strings, it showed the world that here was an artist with more than one string to their bow. But as Tempest examines the stop-and-go motions of being, it also feels like they are asking what it feels like to be alive, period. I Saw Light is an outstanding track, with its intimate feel creating an impression of Tempest and Chatten facing each other in an unfurnished room, lit only by a dim, bare bulb. The pressures of maintaining relationships, of battling illness, addiction, poor mental health, the vacuous life of our online selves. Having developed a burgeoning reputation with a mix of sold-out headline shows, gigs supporting Kings of Leon, Inhaler, Pixies and The Reytons plus major radio airplay, we were thrilled to be part the band’s ascension and see such a positive reaction to the record’s .On 2019’s The Book of Traps and Lessons, their first Rubin-produced project, Carey reined in his sound, leaving more space for Tempest’s words. The album plays like a chronicle of pressures - the mind-numbing pursuit of a comfortable life, the eternal striving for more, the pressures of the city, the country, the times.