BLACK METAL

Dean Blunt

Rough Trade

The second decade in an already exhausted century. How has it felt? Endless? Overwhelming? To put it bluntly, it has been a period – particularly in the UK – summed up by paradox. Huge acceleration and total paralysis. Future shocks and ghosts of history. Perhaps that’s why, as the 2010s draw to a close, BLACK METAL stands out to us as the definitive LP of the era. From the airy wash of opener LUSH to the final rumbles of GRADE, it is a record as dark and emotionally unclear as the time that created it.

Dean Blunt’s reputation remains that of the prankster. The roll-call of his stunts – from sending a stooge up to collect his NME Award in 2015, to selling toy cars stuffed full of weed on eBay – have seen him talked about as a post-modern piss-taker. When it was released in 2014, reactions to BLACK METAL were typically half-baked, from misclassifying it as hip-hop to dismissing it as “difficult”. What’s striking then, re-listening five years on, is what a work of beauty it is. The ominous Blade Runner swells that give way to crowing saxophones, the brief dub trips that scatter into smoke. Love songs; songs about loss; songs about escape. The way a spectral Joanne Robertson drifts through the album like something half remembered; sometimes duetting with her lead, at other points like she’s been dreamt up in a cloud. Then there is Blunt: an estranged, stoic figure who half-sings, half-talks. Sometimes sneering, often tired.

Dean Blunt may not be the greatest artist of the past decade – it’s a role he likely has no interest in playing – but in his 2014 album he created the most unique musical artefact of our strange, lonely time. It is disoriented, vulnerable and knotted with detail. Po-faced and ironic, yet bursting with humanity. A snatch of glory that occurs when a unique personality tangles with the universe. No other record this decade sounds like BLACK METAL, and it is doubtful one will ever again.

Angus Harrison