The Edinburgh trio Young Fathers have always confounded categories—Tape One and Tape Two, the EPs they released in 2011 and 2013, were often called rap, but always trailing qualifiers—"alt-," "art-," "psych-". Then, as their Shabazz-on-uppers verses ("I Heard") and grimy Yeezus shrieks ("Effigy") faded, they shifted again: their Mercury Prize-winning debut full-length Dead landed somewhere close to what people thought of as "hip-hop," if similarly prefaced—"experimental," "alternative," or just "Scottish."
You don’t call your record White Men Are Black Men Too unless you’re looking to stir up some questions about classification, and with their new album, Young Fathers double down on the confusion they inspired with their earliest releases. Their label bio even leads with the statement that the group has "no ancestors," which is a funny thing to say about three men calling themselves Young Fathers because they all inherited their dads’ names. But their lineage is important, and audible: Graham "G" Hastings was born in Edinburgh; Alloysious Massaquoi hails from Liberia via Ghana, and Kayus Bankole was raised in the US by Nigerian parents. Young Fathers not only have ancestors but draw an enormous amount of energy from them, as White Men Are Black Men Too makes obvious: The record is a direct descendent of TV on the Radio, a grandson of krautrock, a distant relative of the earnest Streets, a grungy nephew of Arcade Fire. And, though it might change by the next time around, they’ve hit an unqualified category, for the first time: this is a rock record, almost a pop record. It’s raucous, messy, marked by a profound sense of urgency, intended to uplift and discomfit.
Remarkably, White Men Are Black Men Too also addresses the questions posed by its name. The lyrics begin the conversation, but only get so far: "Old Rock N Roll" starts with "I’m tired of playing the good black/ I’m tired of having to hold back/ I’m tired of wearing this hallmark for some evils that happened way back." Then, the speaker flips his loyalty—"I’m tired of blaming the white men/ His indiscretion don’t betray him"-—and reverses the album title: "A black man can play him." Then it flips back: "Some white men are black men too, nigga to them, a gentleman to you."
The idea is jumbled, a little hollow, mostly a venting of frustration. More to the point is this simple line on "Rain or Shine": "I ain’t strange enough." And the most honest moment on the album, the moment where Young Fathers delineate their worldview the most clearly, is on the album’s standout (and most overtly TV on the Radio-soundalike) single "Shame", which begins with a dusty, drum-machine twinkle and rises up into a big, ragged, radio-ready melody. The chorus, self-flagellating and triumphant, switches between cries of "It ain’t right, baby" and "What you do to feel better! What you do to feel good!"
But at any rate, the words are just the address on the envelope; the music is the letter itself. There is an appealing coherence in the album’s composition. Most of the tracks are built on juxtaposition between the low and high register: a vamping bass riff against a shrill glockenspiel, a dark guitar loop beneath a top cacophony of horns, synths, vocal wails. It’s a simple framework and a strong mirror to Young Fathers’ submerged cultural project: delineating a foundational reality (race, genre) and then mounting a tantrum against it. And, in the midst of this dissonance, the album’s sound is all tied together by shreds of surefooted, strong pop melody: "27" sounds almost like pitch-warped Passion Pit by way of the Avalanches, and "Dare Me" seems like a sweet little organ-backed ballad until it throws up a middle finger and breaks into an atonal, menacing shuffle.
It’s not all coherent or wholly successful. Young Fathers’ people’s-mic earnestness can combine with their penchant for major-chord toplines to produce a funky but unmistakable cheese, as in "Sirens". Their fractious energy slants unfocused at times, too, and though the group does answer the question provoked by their album title, they do so by throwing their hands up—compacting the past like so much garbage and charging ahead. The sound of White Men Are Black Men Too is telling enough. It’s triumphant music for the hyperactive, plural city; it’s confrontational as a means to achieving communality, with no particular loyalties except to an anonymous, shifting collective of people who all want the same thing as Young Fathers—to be one thing, then the next, then the next.
