The Line Is A Curve

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In these more positive moments, Tempest can come across as mawkish; their style has always felt aligned with the heightened emotion of the American slam poetry scene, and This Line Is a Curve brims with chicken-soup-for-the-teenage-soul lyrics. Exit Strategy’ was produced by Bernard Butler and part-recorded here across Studio Three, the Gatehouse and Writing Room Three. Tempest and Carey have spent the last several years learning from the studio guru, using their time at Shangri-La trying to reconstruct the relationship between Tempest’s intricately polysyllabic verses with Carey’s post-dubstep productions.

But once we get to the end of Grace, and the album, we loop back to the start – to ‘Kiss off the day with a mute mouth. Next to these, there are album highlights such as ‘More Pressure’ (with Kevin Abstract) and ‘Nothing To Prove’ that are the most pure Hip-Hop songs on any of Kae’s four albums so far, no longer blurring the lines between rap and spoken word. While on the majority of their previous releases Kae was the sole performer on most songs, across this latest work they don’t only bring in big name guests but they also let them have starring roles and take some of the key moments on the album. Being more honest with the world and my community about who I am and letting go of some heavy heavy shame, which is a glorious thing. These general themes, of acceptance, resilience, surrender are also about where I’m at in my personal life, in my journey towards a greater acceptance of myself as an artist and as a human being.

Tempest’s work is at its most profound when the cadence and rhythms embody those of the spoken word.

The Line Is a Curve is a sentimental, prophetic, mimetic, and worldbuilding work that blends moody electronica with elements of neo-soul and grimey hip-hop.For me, the album is about increasing resilience and raising your threshold for tolerance and acceptance. It’s a fascinating listen as a languid synth provides a compelling counterpoint to Tempest’s visceral rap. It might be a stretch to say that this process of coming to terms with and sharing their identity with the world has freed them up in their music as well as their life, but there are hints that this is how they feel on songs such as ‘I Saw Light’: ‘Heart is a yellowing brick/Dead set on a wish that can never exist/A transition/I want to be is but I’m isn’t.

Notwithstanding that, Tempest remains one of our most innovative and thought provoking artists and despite the occasional mis-step, there is plenty enough going on within this album to keep us hooked. It’s as though they have bumped into Yellow Magic Orchestra in Catford High Street and convinced them to become their backing band for this album. The theatrical ebbs and flows of their vocals on Salt Coast acutely capture the timely themes of “sleeve-pulling nervousness” caused by everything from Covid to micro-aggressions. As the album progresses, Carey’s instrumentation becomes wider and lighter, and Tempest’s lyrics become more optimistic—“More grounded/More rooted/Less convoluted,” they rap on “More Pressure” over Carey’s euphoric, oscillating synth.That’s what allows the voices to take centre stage and when it comes to Tempest’s work, the words really matter.