Xavier Dphrepaulezz has the kind of backstory legends are made of – leaving home at 12, living as a hustler in LA, getting a major label deal as an R&B artist, in a coma after a near-fatal car crash – but that’s just something to pique the curiosity, because anyone hearing his first album as Fantastic Negrito will realise that, in the words of Berry Gordy, “it’s what’s in the grooves that counts”. The Last Days of Oakland is blues, but reconfigured as a scream of rage rather than sadness. “What happened, America?” he asks at the opening of Hump Thru the Winter, before howling: “I’ve been working three jobs just to pay my bills … I’ve been working so hard just to get ahead, but they still won’t let me live.” His question throughout the record is: how did America come to this? It sets the question not to a straightforward blues, but one crossed with hard rock, blues and samples – voices babble in and out between songs and over the start of them. Given the context, a reading of Leadbelly’s In the Pines seems less likely to be about faithlessness than homelessness. But it’s never an overbearing or miserable album; Fantastic Negrito wants answers, but he wants you to ask the questions, too.
