In 2010 Gil
Scott-Heron released his final album, I’m New Here. Although it’s got 15 tracks on it, it’s quite
a brief listen at 28 and a half minutes.
What the album is really all about is Scott-Heron’s voice. It’s right in the foreground across the
album, and it’s a voice that stops you in your tracks and demands that you
listen to it.
Many of the
tracks are mainly spoken word tracks, the album starts and finishes with On
Coming From A Broken Home (featuring a Kanye West sample) which sets the
scene. Musically, the accompaniment is
minimal in the extreme, with occasional touches of strings, keyboards and
guitar, and some no-nonsense beats.
Some of the
key tracks are cover versions. Robert
Johnson’s Me And The Devil is old as the hills but it somehow sounds updated
with Gil Scott-Heron’s grizzled voice over the pulsing music. The title track, written by Smog, is calmer
with a plucked guitar as the only accompaniment as he delivers the key lines “I
told her I was hard to get to know, and near impossible to forget”. It’s like a modern form of the blues. Later his jazzy take on I’ll Take Care of You
also works well.
His originals
fit in well with the material, Your Soul and Mine is all snapping beats and brooding
strings, while New York Is Killing Me is even sparser, practically just voice,
handclaps and percussion and The Crutch has arresting effects and
percussion. There are also brief spoken
word interludes such as Parents and Being Blessed which offer short pearls of
wisdom from Gil Scott-Heron.
The album is
not a million miles away in spirit from Johnny Cash’s American Recordings
albums. There’s a fascinating darkness
at the heart of it.
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