Album Review: WHAT IF I SAY NO? by Songer
The British rapper’s sixth album follows the midweek drinkers home and answers the kid he was in 2019.
Alfie & the Alcoholics played Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash covers on banjos and battered guitars in Wokingham pubs, and the frontman’s grandson took his middle name from him. James Alfred Songer inherited the family ear alongside the name. “It’s in the family, people that love music,” he told Rolling Stone this month. “My dad adores music from my grandad, and I adore music from my dad.” The line has stretched from those covers through a childhood of Arctic Monkeys and Eminem records, lunchtimes trading insults with school-mates and teenage MC slots at drum ’n’ bass raves. Into WHAT IF I SAY NO?, his sixth album in seven years, cut almost entirely with the duo Blueboy & Dash.
The pubs his grandad worked are still on “FIND MY FACE,” packed with no hopers, a man stealing his best mate’s old lady, another standing lapping him, kissing his teeth. Mark rings on Sunday, loves footy but hasn’t got Sky watches it in the butchers, flicks the overs in the sweatbox, racks up his drinks and it’s nil-nil, Songer watches until the end with them all, cause no-one understands what he’s for, and asks for the barman to give it for free: “I don’t care that you’re drinking ciders/I’m just drunk and afraid of silence.” A new jacket has been dropped by Brick Lane he is ‘a bad father to a large bag with room for twelve bottles in its side breech, he loves it so calls it a cop, follows it after its work he throws bottles in bushes, built-in chargers, and twenty-four beers, then he wakes up in the back of an Uber “sleeping inside a life far longer than an hour.” He knows he hates the coat after all and wanders back out to find what makes the old belief.
Not one of these hangovers dents his confidence in what gets his fortune teller sacked on “WHAT’S THE PUNCHLINE.” The man read him as destined for greatness and got told he’s been the GOAT forever. He throws coins at anyone rapping about being on the wing like Bale or Beckham, blows off a label’s hundred racks with “I’m happy with the draw, I’m Sam fuckin’ Allardyce” and wants a reply from every two-word rhymer in earshot, where’s the punchline. He gets up on “4 THE RECORD!”: “They aren’t your tunes/They aren’t your bars, and they aren’t your loops” aimed at everyone whose A&R forms half their opinions, though he loses the thread in the second verse, tumble dryers, lost marbles, a skeleton Cartier, nothing becoming a boast or a joke. KiLLOWEN comes through on “PLACES AND FACES” talking a tax bill that costs near on a paycheck or two and a yard that needs a gallery view, while Songer recalls a million label meetings over coffee and telling them it’s a meal or he’s dipping. No spilled milk in his house, just spilled champagne he calls a sign that he’s living.
On “SOMETHING I SAID” he considers the what-ifs of a quieting romance, the praise that has the vibe of a critique, the issues he wrestles with that she easily disposes of, books that span different timelines—and arrives strangely at the card table: “I think I should sack the dealer for the hands that you were dealt.” On “AMMO” the “Sorry” feels like an object, a stain in the carpet, a tear in white wine, a dread of tomorrow morning; he confesses problems that are aware of his name he has not yet named—and will not give her the one thing she’s after: “But I can’t give you the ammo.”
Seven years on from “No More Candles,” all the candles on “NMC2” are back and not one of them has gone out. They tell him the candle that burns twice as bright lives half as long, so if he croaks at forty, look after his songs; he envisages a son as he worries the shoes he’s handed down seem double hard to run in unless he frees the laces he’s rated tight for years. His girl sleeps through a dull week, while he plucks lashes from her cheeks, and she tells him to make a wish; he wishes she sleeps. “I can tell you I can rap, I can’t tell you I’m alright,” he confesses. He slots both hands on “VICES V VERSES,” the vices enhancing him, the verses making his existence visible, and he declines counseling as too ablating when he can tell a million souls in a beat: “They don’t ask me questions they tap their feet.” There is nothing more gratifying than family representing for him; when they play his music, he feels as if they’re checking on him, and from the stage he informs the crowd: “My fan base had my back for a third of my life/When I’m on a stage I’m just watching ‘em live.”
At seventeen, he says on “ORCHESTRA OF SILENCE,” he carried the world on his back, and this continues to be how he operates, albeit after having held everything bottled up for several years and now running around chasing a can. A teenager messages him every day to inform him that the music has rescued his life. The definitive response he receives is that he’s here and you’re never alone, and he desires that if anything is taken from his lyrics, it is that a life is for living because someone’s world crumbles without you.
Songer continues engaging the listener on “ONE RIDE,” and at a certain point begins to pass out directions: run away, don’t close your eyes and live in the moment, and he broadens himself for what could be a school assembly: “No one is better at living than you/As long as the life that you’re living is true.” He glides over “CYBER SEX” as well. Once again innovating successfully with a humorous sight gag about a man in a Hublot from AliExpress, and holding up happily to being hit from middle distance. Negotiating over his glasses kept “in sleep mode,” and doing a second verse reaching for Tina Turner and falling back relaxed.
For “FRONT ROW SEATS” forward he points, child poverty at an all-time high, a pendulum no one can swing back on, politicians he calls gaudy, the best ramble in the verse is at his own expense: “I’m always left-dragging/But now I’m fucking left-dragging on the side of the kitchen.” First and only in the chorus, little miss green eyes, without whose sparkle he doesn’t think he’d care at all. He sits, stoners in back, double-checks he shut the windows, sits in front of the speakers playing voice memos from 2017, a teenager lecturing him about the exact life he soon entered into, and still leaves a busker a hundred for imposter syndrome.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “BONES,” “NMC2,” “VICES V VERSES”