By the time you’ve paid the rent, topped up your Oyster card, purchased a sandwich of increasingly questionable value, and surrendered eight hours of your life to somebody else’s idea of productivity, the average Londoner has approximately enough money left to contemplate the benefits of organized crime. The great British promise of upward mobility has become a practical joke played on people whose principal ambition is to make it through Thursday without checking their bank balance. Somewhere between the landlord, the boss, and the creeping suspicion that life has become one enormous direct debit, a man might reasonably begin to lose his patience. Fortunately, frustration makes excellent material for pop music, particularly when accompanied by a bassline that sounds capable of talking its way into an after-hours club.
Leicester-born, London-based Jamal Bucanon has plenty to say about the absurdities of ordinary existence, and his latest single, Spill It, released through Tropics’ new record label Modern Entity, finds him cultivating a wonderfully crooked corner of British indie rock and post-punk. There’s something gloriously disreputable about the groove, with a muscular backbeat, funky bass movement, and guitar work that seems to have wandered out of some particularly eccentric corner of the 1990s alternative underground. The guitars have a wiry, restless personality, occasionally sounding as though they’re arguing among themselves while the rhythm section carries on with the business of getting everybody moving. Fans of Australian oddballs Regurgitator will recognize a similar appetite for elastic rhythms, eccentric guitar figures, trip-hop and the gleeful collision of alternative rock with danceable funk.
Bucanon belongs to that fine British tradition of turning social irritation into entertainment, following a lineage that stretches through The Streets, Hak Baker, and Headache, with a considerable debt to the louche conversational mannerisms of Baxter Dury. His delivery suggests a man who has spent far too much time observing other people’s ridiculous behaviour to remain entirely polite about it. There’s humour in that resignation, and a wonderfully English capacity to make existential exhaustion sound like something overheard between pints.
Spill It‘s beat invites movement while the guitars keep matters deliciously askew, conjuring the days when alternative rock could be funky, funny, faintly menacing, and magnificently strange without worrying about which record-shop divider it belonged behind.
Bucanon’s music inhabits the uncomfortable territory between ambition and disillusionment, where the desire for change rubs against the exhausting mechanics of survival. And if the modern metropolis is determined to squeeze every last penny and remaining ounce of patience from its inhabitants, at least somebody has had the good sense to give the resulting irritation a decent backbeat.
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