The acclaimed London rapper, now 30, returns with a fourth LP that brings his nice guy, tender, candidly earnest persona to a whole new level of almost horizontal gentleness, adding a lazy talk-singing style to his oeuvre, in a release centred around being parent with two young children. While Carner (aka Benjamin Coyle-Larner) is praised for his non-macho, honest vulnerability, copiously praising his mum, variously tackling mental health and other themes, especially in his last album, Hugo, at certain points here, despite the embrace of family life, his level of tender sweetness can get a tad saccharine, banal even. There’s an especially laid-back, stripped-back minimalism to the music, produced by Avi Barath, who apparently tricked Carner into singing what he thought were placeholder parts, with an added tumble of scattering beats, acoustic guitar and piano, and a vibe so slow it’s almost languorous, from the cosy child sounds the begin opener Feel at Home (the album images includes child’s pen scrawls across his face) but especially on the slow dragging In My Mind, All I Need, or Time To Go, in which the rapper who is known for some slick phraseology, here very much sounds like a stoned and exhausted dad. There are still some edges, such as on Lyin, self-describing himself as “just a man trained to kill, to love I never had the skill”, and a poignant bried socio-political sample of the great departed poet Benjamin Zephaniah on Hopefully (a highlight to the album), or the pacy, jazz-inflected Horcrux. And on lead single About Time, which closes the album with more childhood burbles, there’s a reveal about trying to mix creativity with fatherhood, and balancing the chores of fatherhood with a hinted row with his partner and “another fucking thing I know you couldn’t forgive”. “It’s about time I learned my lesson”, he raps, but sometimes it’s important to learn that despite huge success, even headlining the Other Stage at Glastonbury, delivering up an album can also come across as simply too easy. Out on Polydor / Universal.
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