Kneecap – Fine Art: Review

Kneecap’s new album is an uncompromising but hyperactive grab bag of styles and moods that never gives up its intent to make you dance.

It very much helps in the 21st century to offer equal opportunity to all.

It also helps to have some perspective about your art, so Moglaí Bap – one of the three members of West Belfast hip hop group Kneecap – was hardly boasting when he declared: ‘The beauty of Kneecap is that we not only piss off people from the Unionist background, we also piss off people from the Irish community…We don’t discriminate who we piss off.’

A LOT of history brought Northern Ireland to where it is (Google is your friend), but along with partners in crime Mo Chara and DJ Provaí, he’s witnessed just how far people are prepared to go in manufacturing offence.

Admittedly, some has been cheekily provoked (2020 single Get Your Brits Out satirically imagined a night out with members of the country’s ultra-conservative Democratic Unionist Party) however, just as much bile has been aimed at their rhyming in Gaelic in an attempt to keep alive a tongue banished from urban areas centuries ago.

If all this sounds a little heavy, be reassured that Fine Art is an uncompromising but hyperactive grab bag of styles and moods that never gives up its intent to make you dance.

Having secured Toddla T as producer, the protagonists ditched all the material they’d been working on and instead followed his vision – which was simply to tell the story of Kneecap or, as Chara says, ‘Taking you by the hand and leading you into our world’.

Fleshing out the idea, it was decided there was no better gateway to this madness either than a pub, a fantasy boozer specially constructed for the purpose which they labelled The Rutz.

Like all the best places, here anything can happen. Opener 3CAG – confusingly not the widely posted spoken word skit – is a soaring, old-meets-new confection of pipes, bass and breaks that features the voice of Lankum’s Radie Peat to brilliant effect, whilst the hooligan blast of I bhFiacha Linne samples 808 State’s ancient rave staple Cubik.

In amongst the chaos are brash interludes recorded by band and friends including DJ Annie Mac, adding to the sense of place, an alternate reality where, according to Moglaí Bap, ‘You’re in there enjoying a pint at the start of the night then you go to the toilet and someone’s offering you cocaine, you go out and have a fag and bump into new people and all the time, the mood and the energy keeps changing’.

He can say that again. The title-track’s spleen rupturing low end is trap from a place you’d least expect to find it, Harrow Road merrily spoofs a visit to London with a verse from Jelani Blackman, whilst the manic energy and unforgiving thwack of I’m Flush is the sound of a body with a head full of Colombian Cold.

There’s a thing about going up coming down though, a cause and effect made real on the more lucid Better Way To Live which features Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten.

All the same, what hits hardest is the vibe of Parful, a 1am drop of a tune in tribute to Belfast’s 90’s rave scene, a non-sectarian refuge of love, drugs and togetherness. It’s only then that you realise that these are young men who never experienced the violence of the era but were made in it just the same.

The notes for Fine Art draw a comparison to the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head, and although that sounds a bit far-fetched initially, the break-it-to-fix-it attitude, genre dipping and general sense of rap anarchy are common markers, similarly emblematic of hip-hop’s ability to critique and elevate its environment.

It’s easy being blind to the flaws of something because it’s made by artists who are hated by people you hold in equal contempt, but Kneecap are too clever to rely on fair weather allies, love gaming the institutions they know will be gone the time they’re in middle-aged rehab.

In tearing down the peace wall in your head and offering the real thing through beats and chemistry, getting into Fine Art is an equal opportunity you should take.