Manchester’s <person>Bugzy Malone</person> has finally finished his first full-length record, which is big news because <person>Bugzy</person> 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. <person>Malone</person>’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 / <person>Wiz Khalifa</person>”), 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.