Blackhaine – Saints In The Wethouse
The debut LP from multi-hyphenate artist Blackhaine builds his harrowed world grander than ever before, but loses some of its character in the process
It’s a bleak furrow Blackhaine ploughs. His choreography is full of wrenching movements blooming into pained transcendence, his music a punishing take on UK drill where trauma, addiction, sex and violence spew forth into something darkly sinuous. On his full length debut, after a world built in EPs and mixtapes, he luxuriates in the space, and even at its most claustrophobic there’s an imposing sense of scale. In some ways this scale works well. His novelistic use of repeated imagery makes the cycles the central character is trapped in vividly felt, peeling back more layers as they circle round in increasingly fraught guises. When paired with the grinding noise of 5 Days, it makes for a bracingly naked listen.
The issue is that despite the record’s overall momentum being solid, on a track by track basis there’s something lacking. A solid chunk of the individual tracks suffer from a lack of identity, too much of the production oddly characterless, a kind of Yeezus by numbers that can’t quite free itself from its influence. It’s a shame, as past Blackhaine records (as well as those of producers Space Afrika and Rainy Miller, present here) have shaped similar tropes into something idiosyncratic and spectral, whilst giving enough of a rhythmic skeleton for his bars to really snap. There’s moments they find this, such as on Pyrex, but there are a few too many moments where his words are left to be lost in a dreary fog that’s without much in the way of impact.
Listen to: Pyrex, 5 Days, Born From Wound [Floodlights]