Strange Fruit

M9 has already this year given the grim, gutter-sniping end of hip-hop an impressive coat of fresh dirt on the light-blocking Anathema, as part of poet laureates for tower block turmoil Triple Darkness.  In the run-up to his solo 144,000 long-player, M9 forbidding Fruit isn’t in the mood to suddenly start sounding chipper, nor become a seller of timeshares on the harshest of council estates.
 
With Jon Phonics on the boards to rough up a burdened set of piano keys and drum kicks representing the trudge through alleyways you do your best not to occupy, Strange Fruit is at-the-scene accounting for street life’s hostilities. Hood up and head down, you can imagine M9 rhyming by the only working light-bulb in the building; thoroughly hard-bitten but elucidating what’s an engaging misery where “love is just an illusion”. Chemo’s remix flips a spaghetti western, who-can-draw-first set of guitar twangs and a feeling of there being something expectant in the air, marginally taking the original out of the shadows but for M9’s declarations meaning that any daylight is always going to be too bright to bear.

Paintbrush, flanked by Masikah and Triple Darkness brethren Cyrus Malachi and pitching all three emcees as by night-henchmen/educated artisans who eloquently remove fingers when there’s a debt to be settled, has Chemo taking his chance to tune out the optimism. Using eerie wolf howls/banshee wails and a line of nervous energy, shaped by a breeze sending wind chimes to predict imminent downfall, M9 can’t be shaken on the mic. Such is his grip that he’ll remain last man standing when the apocalypse he talks about (and could just as well welcome if it meant wiping out some of the ways of the world) does come.

Until then, the album should be a wickedly pitch-black set of bone-chilling tomes.