Speech Debelle - Speech Therapy [Album]

Big Dada

September 30, 2009, 06:30 AM

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I've gone through a number of different opinions of this album and have settled right in the middle of all of them, like some kind of bland, opinionated pillock.

Firstly, I was really annoyed by Speech Debelle's voice and articulation. She has a whining nasal voice and hardly enunciates, putting me on a pompous, Daily Mail edge of standards of presentation and left me feeling like a grumpy old man who hate's anything colloquial. Her voice is grating, the technicality of the rap is sub-par, the rhymes are sloppy and it lacks a lot of vocal depth with it being quite monotonous. The music behind the words has a nice jazz-hip hop feel to it, and I think I would have much preferred to listen to the instrumentals of these tracks. Having read a number of articles about the intellectual and emotional content of "Speech Therapy," this was obviously a rash and unjust conclusion to come to before giving the album the chance that many obviously believe it deserves.


This caused me to try, maybe a little too hard, to connect with it emotionally. The lyrics discuss Speech's obviously quite rough cut in life. From not having a father around while growing up, to her boss being an 'A-hole' to having a rubbish boyfriend, the list goes on and on. Poor girl, I thought, what a rough life she's had. I began to appreciate the album, the way that I felt I was supposed to, the way that all the articles and reviews had told me to feel. A melancholy autobiography, making the listener empathic, guilty and responsible for the hard life that today's urban youth have.

This extreme emotional response caused me then to rebel against my own opinion of Speech Debelle, I began to resent her for her self importance and solipsism. The lyrics, obviously being about herself, didn't resonate with me, leaving me feeling unconnected with the music. The lyrics didn't speak to me directly and although the lyrics were full of emotion, it left me feeling quite unmoved. I felt like she was trying to force me to have an emotional response and that I was being manipulated to feel a certain way, when this would not have been my natural response.

Now, as I write this, I'm kind of in the middle of those extremes. I am contempt with the basic style of the rhymes, I have an appropriate level of empathy for the protagonist of the stories I'm being told and I am very much enjoying the musical tracks. Of course, she did win
the Mercury Music Prize for Speech Therapy and as we know, the things that win these kinds of awards are always the best.

The music, as I said earlier, is a Jazz-hiphop hybrid, incorporating mainly strings and synths over the drums. This style of music is something I would immediately associate with the Record Label, Ninja Tune, of which Big Dada is the hip-hop branch.

Overall, the initial impact of the album is quite huge, but once I'd listened to the album a lot, I reached a happy medium and the strong feelings subsided and I found I could just enjoy it. It will stay in my collection and I won't skip any of the songs, should they come on in my random playlist, what more could I ask of an album that I hated twice?

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