Review: Potent Whisper (@PotentOfficial) ‘New Radical’

To be a con­scious rap­per is a chal­len­ging task. It has to do with bal­an­cing music­al­ity with present­ing inter­est­ing ideas. Many rap­pers have failed in this pursuit.
There­fore, when I was asked to review Potent Whisper’s new ep, New Rad­ic­al, I feared that it might fall short. That it might be noth­ing more than recycled Lowkey or Akala. How­ever I was presently sur­prised to find that Potent Whis­per does indeed bring some­thing new and unique to the table.

Firstly on a music­al level, he does not lim­it him­self to a 90bpm old school hip-hop vibe that makes the listen­er say ‘not again…’. Instead he embraces a range of elec­tron­ic land­scapes that are a reflec­tion of the con­tem­por­ary age. On the four-track EP, we hear tracks that are influ­enced by Grime, Trip-Hop and chilled-trap. Although the tracks range in genre, they fit neatly togeth­er and flow eas­ily into one another.

Secondly, although we’ve heard sim­il­ar mes­sages in con­scious rap, Potent Whis­per has his own brand of send­ing them home to the listen­er. Rather than pla­cing him­self on a mor­al high ground where he preaches truth to the audi­ence, he places him­self in the middle of the con­fu­sion. He brings our atten­tion to what he believes to be the impend­ing doom all around us. But at times he gives his opin­ions on how to deal with these issues and how to be a bet­ter person.

The Ep opens with a grime track called ‘Deep Cuts’. It comes as a heavy intro­duc­tion to the sorts of themes and sounds that we will hear in the fol­low­ing tracks.  At the start, we hear Potent Whis­per mut­ter ‘they nev­er loved you, they only fucked you’ as the track builds over a cres­cendo of horn and brass samples. The drums drop sud­denly and he raps rap­idly about build­ing an army and ‘bad­din’ the one per­cent’. Here we start to real­ise who he is refer­ring to when he says ‘they’. The lyr­ics explain how oppressed we are and how the sys­tem is con­tinu­ally abus­ing us. To great effect, a dis­tor­ted church choir sample enters the mix, adding to the already intense sound of the track. Whisper’s inten­tion seems to be to shock the listen­er and remind them of the harsh reality.

The next tracks, ‘Us, the Work­ers’ and ‘Like Dav­id, like May’ fol­low on from these themes and bring them closer to home by present­ing us with more emo­tion­al imagery. ‘I wake up and make love to hard­ship’, Whis­per says on ‘Us, the work­ers’. He talks about depres­sion, under­pay­ment and his frus­tra­tions with the government.

The pro­duc­tion on this song reminds me of Trip-Hop. It is slow, spaced out and haunt­ing. ‘The polit­ic­al doom is loom­ing above all of our heads’, it seems to say. On ‘Like Dav­id, like May’, how­ever, it feels like the track is con­tinu­ally rising to a drop that nev­er comes. You expect the bass­line and drums to get more com­plex, but it nev­er happens.

‘Remem­ber Love’, the last song, stands out on the EP and presents the listen­er with ideas of hope and peace. After Potent Whis­per has adequately shocked you with the hard truths of the world, he reminds you that love is key in deal­ing with life.

As he raps in a more con­sol­ing tone, string instru­ments play under­neath. Church choir samples make anoth­er appear­ance but this time they hit high notes and present a feel­ing of tran­scend­ence. A female vocal­ist comes in on the hook, telling us to let love hold us. Her voice is so full and heav­enly that we will­ingly accept her words and indeed remem­ber that feel­ing of love. It is then that we real­ise that Potent Whis­per is deep­er than what we may have pre­vi­ously thought. He is not here only to remind us of the polit­ic­al situ­ation but also to remind us of what we should be fight­ing for.

New Rad­ic­al is avail­able to stream on all major plat­forms and avail­able to down­load exclus­ively from band­camp: www.potent-whisper.bandcamp.com 

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Nicholas Milverton

A writer with an interest in Philo­sophy, Soci­ology, Anthro­po­logy and all things intro­spect­ive. Someone who is equally at home in under­ground house raves as he is in café’s. He is con­tinu­ally ques­tion­ing the sys­tem and his own lines of reas­on­ing. There­fore, he is always rein­vent­ing himself.

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