“Feels like a thousand years shut in the room, the wallpaper messed with muddle and paranoia, the machine’s looming watches you from within, the pointed finger, the missing face,” riffs MC Franco Franco over porous industrial thumps and bursts of noise laid beneath him by producer Kinlaw. Although ‘Air Loom Gang’, the opening cut from the Bristol-based duo’s latest album Faith Elsewhere, alludes to the wild claims of the 19th-century merchant/conspiracy theorist/activist James Tilly Matthews about warmongering mind-control methods, the lyrics at hand are anything but historical or hysterical. They are alive, concrete, and pointed at us, at this very moment.
Emerging from chance freestyle sessions circa 2018, the Avon Terror Corps-aligned duo have spent the past seven years probing and poking at capitalism’s machines – ploughs, looms, or smartphones, it makes no difference – that have been terrorising humanity from various directions; their productions biting, words and rhymes strangling. Yet, drop the needle anywhere on the new LP and you’re just as likely to encounter slow-mo trip-hop beats, widescreen pop, and deconstructed R&B balladry. That is not to say Kinlaw and Franco Franco have given up. They sound as convinced and full of spunk as ever, but their gaze is now sober and cunningly abrasive rather than outright belligerent.
You’ll struggle to find music that feels so in the now, so capable of expressing the anxieties, angers, paranoias, and sensation of inevitability – but never helplessness – as the ten cuts on Faith Elsewhere do. “The market is free to rise”, raps Franco Franco mockingly on ‘A Spectre Still Haunting’, his words clattering around clanking bottles and stunning evergreen-like atmosphere in a pointless search for a fairer system, soon to be pushed aside by the diaristic, old-school pop rap lines of ‘Pitstop 2024’. Elsewhere, ‘Romantic Warrior’ dives into stories of star-crossed lovers found in sci-fi like Blade Runner, DARK, and Annihilation, with a deadpan, serrated inflection scraping against paradoxically raw but soft dark ambient tropes: “I’m burning with self-destructive demons, in a phosphorus blaze, I emerge as an alien in chrome, inside a cosmic beacon.”
Franco Franco’s witty turns of phrase and amusing cultural references get lost in translation from Italian to English, yet the original verses are often just as bleak, filled with puns that go from funny to gut-wrenching in a second, absurd humour that can’t escape the gallows, and mundane quips that take on darkest meanings. As hinted by standout guest spots on ATC colleague Dali de Saint Paul’s Endless Summer and DJ Die Soon’s My Brothel In The Wind, the MC has been in great form recently, his flow dashing and delivery mercurial, the fluidity of the Italian language stretched, contracted, and mangled to fit whichever context needed.
On ‘Need A Grip!’, Franco Franco’s voice becomes a disembodied ghost, floating over Kinlaw’s sheets of spectral noise. ‘Crocs On The Plough’ has him inflect in a boom-bap meets trap style, boxed in by skewed, pitch-shifted effects and ‘Magone’ submerges him into a slow but deep melancholy sway, making the music a comforting escape from the lyrics’ harrowing reflection on labour exploitation.
For all the malaise that haunts Faith Elsewhere, the reprise version of the title track closes the album with a ray of light – it’s tiny, dim, and far away, but Kinlaw and Franco Franco plead for it. Here, in the end, gentle guitar plucks, softly reverberating synths, and a low frequency that throbs like a heart carry a starkly earnest singsong: “I need love, until I have it, I won’t stop.”
