Everybody Down review – urgent hip-hop from acclaimed poet Kate Tempest

Long before she won the Ted Hughes award for poetry last year, south Londoner Kate Tempest was a veteran of open-mic nights. She's returned to hip-hop for her debut album; uncluttered production is courtesy of the versatile Dan "Mr Dan" Carey (Bat for Lashes, Franz Ferdinand). An arts prize judging panel might call Everybody Down a song cycle, but really it's an urgent hip-hop record in which flawed but hopeful characters – international relations graduates, lowlifes, lovers – stumble into dramas. It's not unlike Plan B's Ill Manors, but with more female protagonists and more internal perspective. These are fictions, but they reflect raw truths in a way that draws you up short. "Them things you don't show, I can see/ Them things you don't say, speak to me," Tempest reckons. Her novel is due out later in 2014.