The Boy Who Played the Harp

Few absences have been felt as heavily in the U.K. as Dave’s. "You wanna know the reason it’s taken me four years?/It’s me that’s gotta carry the pressure" he laments on "My 27th Birthday." There’s a continual sense here that the pen’s heavier than the crown this time around. Yet it’s clear that the years away have been used to put more complex conflicts on record: on his long-awaited third LP, The Boy Who Played the Harp, Dave strings religion, responsibility, and hypocrisy into his most intricate album to date. Structured loosely around the biblical book of Samuel -- where David, a skilled lyre player able to banish ills with his music, is anointed King -- the rapper’s third set casts Dave as his biblical namesake, religion forming an invisible counterweight to his words. This biblical core is at its most direct on the torch-passing “Chapter 16,” a genuinely joyous dinner-table sparring with fellow legend Kano: “let’s make a track about this dinner and this stamp you gave me” Dave riffs, the two holding their stories to the light in a parallel of David and Samuel. Elsewhere, he frames his success as divine purpose (“This is God’s plan, he said it to me”), the ghostly hand of James Blake working deftly alongside Dave’s in creating resonant, arching soundscapes. But more often, the picture we get is of a man struggling with his faith: “I prayed for new shoes and used them to walk away from You” he laments on “175 months,” a moving confessional set over Hoodies All Summer-esque vocal chops. Psalms are interrupted by dark jokes about the Clermont twins, soaring organ-notes discolored by threats of “your head on a beam” and sneering brags -- Jim Legxacy even invokes Isiah 54:17 in the light of London’s drug trafficking. There’s an understanding that faith, first in South London and now amid the trappings of fame, is something that never configures itself easily. The album’s whole second half -- barring the clunky “Marvellous” -- finds weight in these contradictions, in turn producing some of the best material of his career. On the breathy “Selfish” and Psychodrama-like “The Boy Who Played the Harp,” his words land like hammer blows, the former framing himself as a “cancer” amid late-twenties anxieties; the latter questioning his integrity as he projects himself onto past generations. The aching “Fairchild,” one of the few moments where Dave gives the spotlight away entirely, lets Nicole Blakk capture the devastating reality of male-on-female violence, with Dave’s voice joining hers before he probes his own past complicity. Yet the most complex story of all arrives within Dave himself on the monolithic “My 27th Birthday,” a troubling masterpiece that sees him lurch from one darkness to another, turning himself inside-out with an erratic yet all-seeing eye. TBWPTH is skeletal, grandiose, and contemplative, a web of contradictions where answers come with questions of their own; caught between darkness and light, the U.K. legend wrings out some of his most compelling meditations yet. ~ David Crone