Track Of The Day #763: Benjamin Clementine – Condolence

Benjamin Clementine‘s recent Mercury Music Prize win was one as deserved as any in the awards’ two decade-plus history, serving to be what the award should really be about; a signal boost for a story that deserves to be told. The context of his debút album At Least For Now, which was released after the (once again) London-based artist had spent several years busking and at times sleeping rough in France has been well publicised, but Clementine’s work isn’t one that needs a crutch of mythology.

Nestling in the final third of At Least For Now, ‘Condolence’ is one of its most intriguing pieces. It initially appears to move at a faster pace than the rest of the album but behind the snappy drumbeat that introduces and carries the track there are ebbing pockets of ambiance and fractures of piano melodies that conjure up a sense of unease and trepidation.

There is an immediate and almost eerie similarity to the work of fellow Londoner Douglas Dare, whose own debút Whelm would have been a deserving recipient of the Mercury’s signal boost last year; both artists possess a virtuosic understanding of the piano and a desire to pick apart and at times submerge the soliloquies they compose on them, and both also write with an obscured but undeniable personal weight.