216: Engurland (City Shanties), by Dizraeli

Dizraeli (United Kingdom)
Engurland (City Shanties) (2009)
12 tracks, 42 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Engurland (City Shanties) was the album that poet-rapper Dizraeli made shortly before he formed The Small Gods, whose album Moving in the Dark we’ve already discussed.

After a long time fronting the Brighton-based funky-dubby D’n’B hip-hop band Bad Science, this was the first time he struck out under his own (stage) name, and took a bit of a different direction with it. All the way through this album, although there are many different factors and influences, the most frequent and obvious is the blend of hip-hop with British folk. It’s not as simple as Dizraeli just rapping over some twee English tunes with a beat to them, though. Instead, it’s more that he’s taken the way stories are told in traditional folk songs and applied that same technique to his own lyricism, whether in his raps, poems or songs. The melding of folk music and hip-hop instrumentals (as well as jazz, bits of classical and the like) is definitely still present here, but it’s done – like all of Dizraeli’s work – with the utmost intelligence and ingenuity that there’s not a shred of contrivance in the whole thing.

Really, there’s so much to love on this album, whatever your preferred direction is. The title track ‘Engurland’ is the most recognisable track on the album and probably the one that got the most attention – it’s a clever use of Fat Les’s ‘Vindaloo’ that takes a rather bleak overview of the grottier side of modern Englishness with a wicked chorus – but there’s so much else here. From a hip-hop angle, there’s some of the most addictive rap flows I’ve ever heard in ‘To the Garden’ and ‘Good God’; there’s beautiful, sad songs in ‘Take Me Dancing’, ‘Reach Out’ and ‘It Won’t Be Long’; there’s the absurdist poem ‘Bomb Tesco’ and the heart-breaking spoken-word story of ‘Maria’; there’s even some delicious folk-baroque instrumentals in ‘Pen Tangle’ (geddit?) and ‘Reach In’.

Engurland (City Shanties) has an (obviously, unavoidably) more youthful sound than his later work – ever so slightly more naïve, perhaps a tiny bit performative in some of its edginess – but it’s not actually any the worse for that. This is an album of outstanding craft, full of incredible rhetorical acrobatics, laugh-out-loud moments and genuinely spine-tingling moments (I’ll never forget his performance of ‘Maria’ to a packed Jazz Café: unaccompanied spoken word and the crowd was silent, hanging off every syllable until the chorus, when every voice in unison and entirely unbidden, began to sing as one. Tear-inducing.)

I said a similar thing last time, but I honestly do believe that Dizraeli – as a wordsmith, as a thinker and as a musician – should be legitimately regarded as a genius. It was obvious ten years ago when this album came out and it’s only been shown to be the real deal with everything he has done since. If you don’t follow the work of Dizraeli, I urge you to delve deep – there’s an ocean in his work.

[If you want to know more about Dizraeli, I highly recommend the thorough and well-written article on UKHH by Emilia Cox, entitled ‘Dizraeli: The Story So Far’]