Jamie T Kings & Queens (EMI)
4/5
By: Matt Tomiak
A number of follow-up albums from young British artists have received unexpectedly warm receptions over the past 12 months (See also: The Horrors, Jack Penate, The Maccabees), but it is Wimbledon’s Jamie T who had perhaps progressed most signficantly since a patchy mid noughties debut.
He may not have moderated his barrack room language, but ‘Kings & Queens’ is a vastly more lavish, varied and mature effort than Panic Prevention. JT’s undeniable ear for a tune as well as the glimpses of smart lyricism on his first record had a tendency to get submerged beneath unedifying dollops of gleeful delinquency, but a couple of years down the line we find the motormouthed Jamie older and wiser without compromising the streetwise, genre-defying outlook that characterised his arrival on the capital’s music scene in 2006/07.
Kings & Queens draws perhaps most heavily on The Clash, but the best tracks here stray far and wide beyond any single source of inspiration. The best of the lot is the defiant ‘Sticks & Stones’, a bolshy Springsteen-via-West London evocation of youth and friendship against the odds, and although he proceeds to address domestic terrorism on ‘British Intelligence’, the cute Alex Turner-style pop cultural allusions (“at my shoulder she’s Robert Palmer, acts like a tw*t but she’s a top banana, might as well admit that she’s addicted to love” drawls Jamie on ‘Spider’s Web’) demonstrate he’s never taking himself too seriously.
Topped off with the hankering acoustic Conor Oberst-worthy grouse ‘Emily’s Heart’, it’s clear that Mr. Treays has matched Mercury Prize winner Speech Debelle as an authentic urban voice for 2009.
Artists in this article: Jamie T
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