Dark Days + Canapés

A stretch of the imagination might be needed to hear this album's multiple references to screaming as plausible, given that Obaro Ejimiwe delivers them in typically pensive, resigned fashion, and is not known for even raising his voice. Rest assured, everything else on the two-time Mercury Prize nominee's fourth Ghostpoet album throbs and churns with grim, gripping realism. Parts of Dark Days + Canapés are so bleak in spirit that they sound as if they were recorded in a sweatbox built inside a slag heap. Though some of the instrumentalists from past sessions remain involved, Ejimiwe enlarges his circle of collaborators with the addition of principal producer Leo Abrahams (Brian Eno, Wild Beasts, Regina Spektor), a string quartet, and several vocalists (including Charlotte Hatherley). The supplemental voices are used to positive effect, whether they contrast with or echo Ejimiwe's plaintive surveillance of personal and societal ruination. Daddy G appears on "Woe Is Meee," thus returning the favor of Ejimiwe's lead vocal for Massive Attack's "Come Near Me." Unsurprisingly, the two voices are a match made in purgatory, trading off "I had a dance with the devil/I couldn't keep his pace" and "If I be wicked, then woe unto me," barely above whisper level. On "Dopamine If I Do," one of the strings-enhanced numbers, Ejimiwe forms an unlikely hook out of "Maybe in time you tell me why you walk the earth all alone," and is joined by EERA, whose sweetly aching voice sings of "panic in the air" and "staying afloat" instead of providing her duet partner with an explanation. Not exactly a trip down lovers' lane, but then the mere prospect of a romance provides a break from the nightmare scenarios illustrated elsewhere. ~ Andy Kellman