There is something relentless about the music of South African-born rapper/singer Spoek Mathambo. Manic and jostling, it flings a series of genres-- grime! crunk! electro! dub reggae! post-punk!-- in front of you like so many disorienting flashbulb pops. Father Creeper, his second full-length and his first for Sub Pop, is too frantic to find a groove, attempting to make a virtue of its messiness instead. But it is a wearying listen, overcrowded and too loud and too harsh, and to engage actively with it is to feel your knuckles whiten with effort. It feels like being trapped at a loud party where too many interesting people are talking over each other at once.
It's a shame, because on paper, Mathambo is the kind of musician we say we all want-- fearlessly global, polyglot, making dance music fit for any country's floor. You want to root for him. And taken in isolation, there are lovely, unlikely sounds bleeding out all over the record: the darting-hummingbird synths that flit through "Venison Fingers", the clean-toned high-life guitar that sparkles on "Dog to Bone". The single "Let Them Talk" has a stiffly strutting live-band groove that recalls Franz Ferdinand. But nothing coheres, because nothing is allowed to stick around for more than 16 frantic seconds or so. The record's directive seems to be "bum-rush the palette"; by the time women start singing "yeah, we can work" in an ersatz German-cabaret accent late in the record ("We Can Work"), you're not sure just what the hell is going on, and unconvinced Mathambo knows better.
It doesn't help that Mathambo himself is something of a cipher. His voice is a dry yelp, one without much expressive range, so even when he delivers a vivid polemic about the blood diamond trade on "Put Some Red on It" ("Papa head full of precious stones and oil well/ His greedy fingers dig for booga-booga him can sell/ Ashy old shit, crusty nasty old food/ Learn the slick-tongue trick from the mission school"), you never feel the heat of his indignation. He zips over every coverable inch of his album, but doesn't seem to leave a single mark on it. Lyrically, "We Can Work" contains Father Creeper's clearest and most accessible plea: "I guess I was raised to resent punching the clock," Mathambo says, as he weaves stories about his own shiftlessness around anecdotes about his Uncle Ciba, who never returned from "his never-ending lunch break," and his mother, who was "crushed by the weight of the rock." In the song, Mathambo himself is puking at a bar, and the wry moment is one of few that he owns.
