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KEYWORDS: Speech Debelle, Freedom of Speech, Dan Rule, STACK, essential, guide, JB Hi-Fi online, mag, magazine, jb stack mag jbhifi release date jb hi fi reviews, features, articles, jbhifi exclusives, music, australia, new zealand, vinyl, CD, music, jb hi-fi now, downloads
Three years on from her unlikely ascent to the 2009 Mercury Prize for stunning debut Speech Therapy – with Melbourne’s Plutonic Lab and Wayne Lotek pulling the production strings – young South London MC Speech Debelle’s second long-player Freedom of Speech is an astute, more often than not powerful, coming of age.
Indeed, while her debut represented a kind of internal wrangling, her follow-up is for the most part an impassioned socio-political reveal. Working with your production talent Kwes, Speech emerges as an insightful observer and commentator here.
There are some striking moments – the beautifully restrained ode to the form, Live for the Message; brooding reproach of the oil-driven economy, Collapse; and the tense, scything deconstruction of the media landscape, The Problem for three – but it’s all really backdrop for one beautiful, powerful, transcendent cut in Blaze Up a Fire.
With Roots Manuva and Realism in tow, Speech delivers one of the most incisive and powerful sociopolitical critiques of her generation.“They’re telling me they went to Iraq to help them grow,”she spits.“Their truth pours from the ground in Fallujah.”
Speech Debelle’s elfin cadence might still recall a reigned-in Sue Tompkins of late ’90s Glasgow art schoolers Life Without Buildings, but her petit vocal stylings belie a prose of devastating proportions.
- Dan Rule
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Speech Debelle: Freedom of Speech
Reviewed by Dan Rule on .STACK Magazine Review - Speech Debelle: Freedom of SpeechSTACK reviews new album "Freedom of Speech" by Speech Debelle, in-store at JB Hi-Fi.Rating: 4.0
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Subject: Speech Debelle / Freedom of Speech