Album Review: Nearly Nothing’s Enough by Farma G & Relense
On his second High Focus album, the North London MC writes council-estate depression and mythological self-portraiture with equal conviction, and Relense holds the room steady underneath.
Farma G is the son of Peet Coombes, songwriter and guitarist of The Swimmers, whose “Fool (If You Think It’s Over)” became a transatlantic hit in 1978; Robin and his brother Chester P grew up in Northside London drawn to hip-hop as children, Beatstreet, Breakdance, Roxanne Shanté battles, and by 1993 they had formed Bury Crew, which became Task Force, which produced the Music from the Corner series, which became one of the few UK underground rap catalogs anyone still argues about with real feeling. Nearly Nothing’s Enough is his second album on High Focus Records, produced entirely by Brighton-based Relense, and he has been rapping since 1985, became a father at eighteen and again to twins at thirty-eight, stepped away and came back and stepped away again and came back again, and still calls himself “The prince of psychedelia.” Dorothy who kills properly, Tripitaka with the marker, Sun Wukong born from a stone—these are not allusions; this is how he talks, Beatstreet and Kerouac and Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di” and the Air Max 1s on the estate all feeding the same mouth, and nearly every song here is thick with it.
The distance between that mythology and the body it lives in closes entirely on “Mr. Moany,” where Jazz T joins Farma G for a track that the latter wakes up knackered, rolls out of bed and “the bugs scatter,” straps a spliff, stares at himself in a dirty mirror; his breath smells “like a row of broken gravestones.” The phone only rings when someone is chasing a debt. He plays Call of Duty, doesn’t want to do chores, and the cat food is still on the floor. In the second verse he hasn’t washed in a week, reaches for the Lynx and “a gargle of bleach,” stuffs himself with five Mr Kipling Angel Cakes, watches the news and turns it over, it’s boring, plays the lottery, writes his name in the grime on the window. The chorus says “I’m depressed, I can’t seem to leave the house, and my life is a mess,” and normally that would be platitude, but Farma G has just used two verses to count the empty sweet wrappers and the holes in his socks and the neighbors telling him to empty the bins, and millions of people in Britain are that man and most rap music has no interest in him.
The estate gets the same attention on “Peace Pipes.” He comes from “an estate, any old estate,” where kids can “Whip the coke to the crack but they can’t tie their shoelace on their Air Max 1s”; the field they used for run-outs is a new block of flats, the place they used to love is now a squat for the cats, and Farma G walks along the Thames at sunset with his thoughts “Drenched in revenge” directed at “Posh racketeers” who “Make careers out of poor men’s tears.” He calls out Eton school bullies as a class, and the run-outs and the Air Max 1s precede the sloganeering, which is why the chorus, “Fuck the police from here to suburbia, Fuck the politicians and their new world order,” lands the way it does. He has named the nighttime disease feeding addicts, the cops never reading your rights, the flats now full of strangers from different places.
That anger carries into “Makes Me Wanna...,” which opens with a Grim Reaper sample and says these rappers running around acting mad make him want to kill them, and “The Circus,” which calls the scene “a clown’s tea party, Barnum & Bailey’s without the trapeze” and arrives at the ventriloquist doll with a hand up your back, one of the razor-edge descriptions of a major-label rapper’s predicament heard in a song this year. The contempt in these tracks has curdled past rage into comedy, and you can hear the Task Force lineage in the disgust, thirty years of watching the UK rap industry and finding it funnier and sadder with every passing season.
Relense’s production holds the record in a single temperature, which is the right constraint for an MC who ranges from conspiracy theory (“X-Files,” whose intro says “tongue in cheek, baby,” and whose verses run through flat-earth, hollow-earth, Nephilim, chemtrails, the Anunnaki, and “free Palestine” before his friends remind him he’s paranoid) to Jack Kerouac on the sofa (“Ya Dead Now,” where he sips tea reading The Dharma Bums with “Emotions fully interlaced” and “Tears upon my pillowcase” and opens Pandora’s box) to industry funeral to mythological self-portrait. The beats thump at one pitch throughout, and the consistency suits the grounded tracks and holds steady under the rest; “Sun Wukong” wants vastness and gets the same room, but the room is solid enough that the myth still breathes inside it.
The devotional center of the record is “Sun Wukong”: the Monkey King trapped under a mountain is the only mythology in the song, and Farma G writes into it with concentration, “I lived with the weight of a mountain range on my shoulders, it helped me build the strength of mind to have composure.” He sat in lotus position with Nag Champa incense, “Asked the gods for my name and they replied with one word,” scattered the ashes of dead friends “In an ocean of remorse,” and the grief and the myth fuse until you can’t separate the legend from the man who’s been carrying it. “Matters of the Heart” provides the title: “When you’re born into a world without compassion and love, you live your life like somehow nearly nothing’s enough,” and the line sounds different coming from someone who also writes his name in the grime on his window and plays the lottery and curses the kids having fun outside.
Jazz T appears on “Never Be the Same,” where Farma G finds the coffee, references Cloudy and the dancing goats (the Ethiopian origin myth of coffee), plays ghost like the Flying Dutchman, holds the sword “like McCloud in the Square Gardens,” declares the meaning of life is forty-two “if the Hitchhiker’s Guide was right,” and names himself “Farmer Stargazer Interstellar Space.” “I drew the galaxy and joined the dots and smiled at the sun” has a sweetness the rest of the record has been building toward all along.
Farma G was born in 1974, started writing lyrics at eleven, producing beats on an AKAI MPC 60 by 1990, became a father at eighteen, produced for Mach-Hommy and Conway the Machine and Rome Streetz and Tha God Fahim during his years away, and came back to make two High Focus albums in two years with his blood still MUD and his hook still naming Purly Kings, Bury Crew, Northside until he dies. On “Till I’m Gone”, he asks, “Imagine Jaws without the soundtrack,” which is silence, which is what most people heard when Task Force was making Music From the Corner.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Mr. Monay,” “Peace Pipes,” “Sun Wukong”