Manchester’s Bugzy Malone has finally finished his first full-length record, which is big news because Bugzy has the authoritative, articulate presence that haloes only the best grime MCs. “I paint pictures with words,” he rapped last year, and it’s not a boast. Malone’s canvases reveal parallel worlds of poverty, physical and mental hunger, rage turned inwards and out, lives undervalued and thrown overboard – sink or swim, ride or die. Whether his true-life crime yarns are verifiable to the last word doesn’t matter because every bar is delivered beautifully at confessional pitch, with a preacher’s punch and sprinter’s pace.
Problems come when he tries too hard, or not at all. Several songs should run a minute shorter, the occasional lazy rhyme slips past (“teeth-a / Wiz Khalifa”), and some choruses would be better as Instagram memes (“be careful what you wish for”; “you gotta love yourself these days”). Yet the Technicolor productions are often world class, with grownup arrangements and intelligent sampling. Street Life seems a jazzy irrelevance until you focus on the words, a letter to a deadbeat dad – another heartbreaking sequence of brutal bars.
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