Mixtape Review: The Elephant In the Room by Catch
On her debut mixtape, Catch writes incarceration, grief, and her own queer desire into one unbroken self-portrait, and the Lewisham rapper’s eye for the telling detail carries all thirteen tracks.
South London‘s road rap is almost never allowed time for a story to breathe; at such a breakneck pace running on threat and tempo, the lyrics are necessarily racing too fast for grief or doubt to dwell. South London‘s the same patch that propelled D-Block Europe‘s cool-ass flow into the chart stratosphere and a set of postcodes worth of drill into the public psyche, but for a few years, Catch has been one of the few exceptions, recording from its depths and speaking from those depths. She is a storyteller in the way someone will often tell you the worst of their life story first, so you don‘t have to hear it from anyone else. She grew up on the road long enough to be full of stories, as you can tell on her debut mixtape, The Elephant In the Room. She raps as an openly queer woman, putting her desires for women on the same lines as the trap and the parole board, with no change in register and no italics.
Catch tells in the close, close, close detail of someone who has been in the room. She opens “Imagine Being Me” at the gap she grew up in, moving from dining halls to dinner halls, selling cocaine in school, while her friends swam, doing prison calls instead of ringing girls. She watches two of her OGs shoot at each other, then a ricochet hits a woman, and then keeps moving like the fake road that she nods out into. She saves her resentment for performance, for how people upload “RIP tatts” over a friend whom they didn‘t spend time with while he was breathing. On the third verse, she is twelve again, “Playing with my friends and having weird thoughts when all my school friends were linking girls.” She denies having a crush on a girl (Kayla), and traces her desire for girls back to a Lil’ Kim poster on her brother‘s wall. That same eye checks “Playhouses” where she says, “I can tell she loves her child, I see all the playhouses/But they eat dinner with the fork I flip the yay ounce with.” She isn‘t writing from above, she‘s on that push lawn with the playhouses, holding the fork,
Elsewhere, that desire arrives unannounced and ready for action. On “Shine Your Light,” she sings about having another man‘s girl and doesn‘t flinch, even if she spat in the face of a scorned wife ten seconds ago. On “Name With A K” she gets cautious around a woman she‘s got both running through her—a jealousy she word-for-word like a bloke in this lane. She spends a whole song on “Tata” about a flirtation through mutual friends and a two-dollar-and-two-greyhound first date, an argument she tries to compromise with high-end sellotape apologies, then a bitter second half that concludes on “I‘ll just find someone else to be tata for me.” That song has turned just as sly and spiteful as any breakup, and she lets it.
Santan Dave‘s beat for “Heisenberg” grinds underneath Catch instead of cutting in, dark and full enough to run a long verse, from the Tesco jingle the local kids used to sing about her, to the bar she says she has Walter White‘s brain, and will use it the same way, intelligence aimed at the drug trade rather than the classroom. Most of the instrumentals on either side work like that (low and narrow and restrained up top), a slow burn that raises the spirit deliberately. The window opens with “Life‘s Good, Life‘s Great,” a flip of Willie Hutch‘s “I Chose You.” That prefers its weight toward lift instead of menace, chest-heavy bounce wide enough for Figs0 to deliver a gratitude hook while Catch keeps one eye on the world, she has not given up.
And then halfway through “100 Missed Calls,” the point of view shifts. Catch is inside a cell, calling a friend who has made millions and is thinking about killing herself; he‘s saying he wishes his life were like hers, and from inside the cell, she hears the wish that hers were like his. She lets it sit there, two people each unable to believe the story the other has told them, and then she is at the parole board, and the years she is over tariff.
Loyalty is the one value that Catch is forever revisiting, both hands gliding with it. On “The World Still Spins,” she commemorates her sister, who died two days before Christmas, and her brother, Nick, who, after him, arrived, delayed, and, she says, sort of replaced her sister. A friend was deported to Jamaica and shot dead there. The pain is unfussy and bare. Over the next breath, she bitterly ridicules their expression. The flowers on dead rappers she despises, she confesses to an engineer, she won‘t soften a thing, “I’m sorry, Kenny, man, you’ve gotta edit and bleep,” adding the mourners should buy a wreath. On top of that, the contempt was aimed at other rappers for grieving a life that never lived. The verse flits off into something more reliable as her release from jail has reentered her consciousness with the clarity of speech you have to trust.
Young Adz kicks us off on the first verse of “Target.” A friend from Lewisham mapping out the price of being seen (Gave away his Lambo, living with nerve damage and battle scars, Tenement warns the women in his city to stay indoors), before Catch keeps the threat in the country. She designates the phones she can‘t trust, and the ex she‘s warning against putting her on, and asks, listlessly, “You ever seen a fiend get excited when they see your veins?“ It‘s the bando speaking through the rap money, the room she isn‘t allowed to escape, even once she leaves it clean. The money turns out to be real, as real as the work once she has it in her hands; she points the camera toward the second.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Imagine Being Me,” “Target,” “Heisenberg”