Album Review: how the f*** does everybody else manage? by Kamal.
Five years after lockdown made him a fixture of whispered British bedroom pop, the Harlesden singer puts glass shards, benzos, and dying friendships on display. His debut is built to last.
There was just one register in lockdown British bedroom pop, and it was the whisper, soft auto-tuned vocals, close-mic singing, dread made sufficiently comfortable to fall asleep to. Kamal. hails from Harlesden in North West London, whose piano education dates back to the age of six, and who had a habit of writing about homelessness before having any career to protect. Debuting with a so here you are, drowning mixtape, the actual full-length LP strips the gauze off the COVID sound, and asks how everybody else copes.
The whisper has been replaced with a piano playing simple chords, while string arrangements swell up beneath his vocals. Sounding closer to the beat of a slow ballad than to R&B, and on the title track this pressure builds up beneath a chorus based on a denim pun: “Traded true religion for a new balance/Smoke another zoot to keep my mood balanced.” He claims his label has dropped him, and he’s taken this blow to his ego, and that the money vanishes regardless of how slowly it comes. The third verse is all about his mamita, who has promised him that God will cure her sickness but then died, and he wishes to pray for her, but doesn’t know which prophet he should believe in anymore.
The girl in the song “suffer” can lie to his face, call him a cunt, touch wherever she wants him; he requests for her hands to be on his neck and cops to the masochism in the next line, yet stays regardless, singing above piano chords and a drum beat sounding like a heartbeat. On the song “need me less,” he is “too damn young to be feeling this way,” getting minimum wage and working overtime for somebody who is getting used to him, and the post-chorus descends all the way to “I’d rather be dead than not with you.” The what-ifs pile up on the song “contact lenses”: would she stay if he went broke, if he never got signed, if they were better off as friends, until the second verse turns his concern to the outside world, the whore for attention through personalized TV screens, afraid he peaked at eighteen.
Returning to the city of his friend on the song “blood sweat and tears,” poor service, he asks why she won’t send a pin to him and demands that she show her Achilles if she is really a friend. The second verse lists people by name doing various stuff, and all that he has left for each of them is his promise: “Whatever you carrying/You still got a piece of my heart.” The names turn to ages on the song “all my favourite people are sad.” Seventeen when his girlfriend was putting glass shards to her neck, eighteen when he entered her room, and she was passed out off ketamine, twenty-one when his little brother attempted to commit suicide on pills, and the phone call gave him chills. But now he doesn’t answer the phone anymore, scared that someone is dead, while naming benzos with Prozac, some SSRIs, and he keeps up all night laughing until he cries.
Everything drops down to a simple keyboard pattern, light percussion, and a hook that was deliberately left unfinished, the vocal exposed inside a loop of chord, admission, pause, chord once again. “youth” is barely even a thought, soft chords and room tone while he admits wasting it in the very same breath that promises that he is on his way up. Songs as quiet as this begin to rely on the same light keys and drums, and the differences come in whether strings are added, or if there is a guest to change the temperature of the vocals. However, he manages to step out of that blur on the song “a minute phone call,” living existentialism, pessimistic blindness, kids with no pot to piss in, and then “Every time I go online/I see Columbine, or I see demolition” follows without anything softening it. Everyone thinks that they have the best religion, he says, so they never bother to listen.
Keaton Henson pops up on “no friend, no lover” with his thin and fragile-sounding voice, and the arrangement becomes narrower—soft guitar picking around the two voices, while Kamal. stands in his rubber Bottegas and dismisses the plastic flowers, the “Hey, stranger, how are you? It’s been time,” every fake reunion possible, down to the shared outro’s “No ‘Can we catch up?’ on the Jubilee line/No career advice, no, thank you, I’m fine.” Natanya warms up “back then” instead, a soft sway beneath his homecoming verse, arms wide-open like a baby to his favorite toy, and her image of painting the walls of rooms inside her favorite voice, the two of them asking in the bridge to be treated like Play-Doh and taught the way back. Dave provides deep rapping over piano chords and open space on the song “the people that saved me,” grounded and speech-driven, riding the two-five-five through a friendship that was never love, lying in bed and crying out “God, am I better off dead?/What I did for the bread.” Kamal.’s chorus answers him with bodies in the bed, sour tastes, sweet memories that he still longs for.
He boards the tube on “i don’t care,” and a stranger is wearing his ex-girlfriend’s perfume, the scent pulling him back to the time when the two of them were cool, until she gets off at Liverpool Street. Some weeks the entire relationship feels like a dream to him, a halfway-decent movie scene with no verisimilitude. Carmen calls him, no good at texting what she thinks, and gives him shit for letting everybody get underneath his skin, asking him when he’s going to start caring about himself. He claims that he can’t learn a language overnight, that life is a palindrome, born and then you die, the same whether you write it either way. And so he gets drunk, admits he’s not good at being genuine, and swears he doesn’t care about any of it. For a song about not caring, it notices everything, including the station she left him at.
If you or someone you know is struggling, in the U.S. and Canada you can call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline); in the U.K. and Ireland, Samaritans is at 116 123. Support is available around the clock.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “how the f*** does everybody else manage?,” “no friend, no lover,” “all my favourite people are sad”