Album review: Steve Mason: Monkey Minds In The Devil’s Time

SINCE The Beta Band split in 2004 with artistic integrity intact but an alleged £1 million of debt on their shoulders, frontman Steve Mason has ducked and dived, producing material under a couple of solo aliases, King Biscuit Time and Black Affair, which enhanced his reputation as a pop alchemist, if not his bank balance.

Steve Mason: Monkey Minds In The Devil’s Time

Double Six, £11.99

****

But the music released using his own name has been among his best work yet. Mason himself is on more of an even keel these days, following years of depression and a breakdown in the mid-2000s. Now he appears ready not just to face the world, but to take it on with this ambitious follow-up to his debut solo album Boys Outside.

Mason is content to call Monkey Minds In The Devil’s Time a concept album. Quite apart from being the Ian Brown album title that got away, it refers to a Buddhist expression for an agitated mind which can’t concentrate and settle on one thing, a pertinent assessment of an internet age characterised by daft junk and short attention spans.

In contrast, the material on Monkey Minds runs deep rather than broad, encompassing the political, personal and philosophical over one hour and 20 tracks, comprising nine songs which muse on man’s place and responsibility in society and 11 home-recorded sketches which inform the album’s bigger picture and provide the connective tissue. These snippets range from snatches of Irish jigs, street sounds and quotes from classical literature to more fully fledged spacey jazz funk and dub reggae instrumentals overlaid with samples of Italian commentary or Mason’s memories of Christmas past. A nightmarish evocation of Rule Britannia and a brief, venal sample of Tony Blair say a lot using very little.

The opening recitation from Dante’s Inferno, concerning the hellish fate of usurers, sets an ominous tone but Mason hangs fire with the sulphurous sermonising. His main lyrical thrust is personal transformation and Lie Awake, a troubled lullaby to his younger self, is as compelling and poetic an introduction as any opening paragraph of a life story, with Mason softly crooning “at 15 years old I had to know what makes you fail and what makes you grow, I stared at my hands, just like foreign lands – would they do what I wish or would they persist in holding me down?”

The gentle struggle continues on affecting ballad A Lot Of Love, which is soul-searching but never chest-beating. Later, Mason wrestles with how to deal with painful memories on the soulful indie shuffle Seen It All Before and applies the healing musical balm of an uplifting gospel chorus over an Italian piano house refrain to Lonely.

It is only really in the second half of the album that Mason moves out of his own head and house and on to the streets. Oh My Lord provides his means of escape. “There’s a passage through the black, is that sunlight through the crack?” he asks on one of the album’s most accessible pop tracks, recalling the crossover indie/dance sound of Happy Mondays and Primal Scream circa 1990. The sense of release and revelation is carried through to the elegant, stealthy Never Be Alone before Mason turns the mirror outwards for the remainder of the album.

More Money, More Fire is inspired by the 2011 riots, which Mason witnessed first hand from his home in Hackney (he now lives back in his native Fife) – yet he hands over the lyrics to London-based MC Mystro, who provides the commentary in thoughtful slam poetry style, lamenting “it’s almost like someone stood back and let it happen” in measured tones. Mason weighs in with sinister whispered words of retribution over a sultry acid jazz backing on companion piece Fire!, before enacting Operation Mason, a dubby wrecking ball of a track.

Fight Them Back is the most confrontational track on the album, which ends by hanging Tony Blair with his own words in an interview where he reduced Libya to a cash register ripe for plunder rather than a country in need of assistance. If this album receives a fraction of the recognition it deserves, the danger is that its content may be boiled down to its reference to “a fist, a boot and a baseball bat”. Mason is not an advocate of violence, rioting, or even marching. Surprisingly for such a politicised voice, he says he has never voted. Instead, he believes in change through self-education and debate.

Thus far, there are not too many pop voices joining that debate. While Plan B may have the major label might and an existing pop profile from which to launch his angry political missives, it is Steve Mason who is raising the standard of rhetoric with this impressive, defiant, stimulating but also compassionate album.