Interviewed recently, Obaro Ejimiwe – aka Ghostpoet – expressed unease at attempts to pigeonhole his sound. “I’m not hip hop. I’m not any genre. I don’t do genres.” He is as good as his word on the follow up to 2011’s Mercury-nominated Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam.

Once again, Ejimiwe’s characteristic mood is 4am disaffection – he doesn’t so much rap as deliver his patter in an anguished monologue, a chilly consciosuness rush that imbues even the most banal observation (such as his thoughts on a dim sum spread for lunch) with a chain-rattling menace. Musically, he continues to push against the grain: ‘Cold Win’ features hammer and tong beats and a glitchy, horror-movie throb; ‘Them Waters’ surprises with a euro-trance groove that grows increasingly ominous; the punning ‘Thymethymethyme’ possesses the icy sweep of a Vangelis score, though there’s nothing escapist about Ejimiwe’s lyrics, which find him sobbing softly on a train, wondering if he can repair a fractured relationship before it’s too late (stepping into the shoes of his sundered lover Woodpecker Wooliams chimes in with the bombshell that, dude, it’s waaaay too late for that).
Best of all is ‘Dial Tone’, a duet with nu-folkie Lucy Rose – who’d have thought that English pastoralism and apocalyptic gloom could get on so well together?

Key Track: ‘Dial Tone’

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