Father Creeper
- Spoek Mathambo
- Band Name: Spoek Mathambo
- Record Label: Sub Pop
- Release Date: Mar 13, 2012
- Critic Score
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Apr 10, 2012100The music suits because it's also dissociated‑-beaty enough to keep your foot tapping and your subconscious involved, but devoid of the escapist joy that is the miracle of so much Afropop produced from equally horrendous daily struggles.
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Mar 21, 201290While his 2010 solo debut Mshini Wam (translated as Bring Me My Machine Gun) was promising in a guided-by-M.I.A. kind of way, Father Creeper is downright epic.
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Apr 25, 201280Kwaito beats and highlife guitars mesh with hip hop and dubstep, while love songs crash into mordant political satire. [May 2012, p.102]
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Mar 23, 201280[An] equally engaged, energised follow-up [to 2010's Mshini Wam].[Apr 2012, p.94]
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Mar 22, 201280The compelling collision of a pop sensibility with organic guitar riffs, dystopian digitalism and sharp wordplay plays out like the score to a musical set in 2012 Soweto.
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Mar 22, 201280Spoek makes the "hard truths" sound like "real talk" while putting some of the world's most innovative rebel music underneath.
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Mar 19, 201280It's a blistering, at times thoughtful, scattergun grab-bag of magpie musical styles and broken beat rhymes that somehow hangs together with irrepressible energy and invention.
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Mar 14, 201280If this is his starting point, his future seems limitless.
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Mar 14, 201280Spoek Mathambo's mixture of rapid rhymes and genre-melding combining thrillingly.
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Mar 14, 201280Mathambo is both voracious and omnivorous. This leads to a diverse and exciting listen.
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Mar 14, 201280The result isn't a fluid hybrid or warm fusion, but something colder and more uncomfortable and ultimately more intriguing.
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Mar 14, 201280Sometimes, as on "Let Them Talk", the blend is finger-snappingly fluent, but more often it is deliberately disjointed to match Mathambo's fragmented tales of township life.
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Jul 27, 201278The album is certainly worth a spin for any music enthusiast who wants to further expand their already-eclectic listening tastes.
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Mar 28, 201270Mathambo leaps about on a hotplate of styles, rarely dwelling on a groove for long. Move with him, though, because it's worth the breakneck effort.
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Mar 16, 201270It's the most potent sound to come out of South Africa since DJ Mujava's '08 left-field hit on Warp with "Township Funk." [Apr 2012, p.82]
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Mar 14, 201270A nervy urgency courses through all of the album's experimental tangents.
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Mar 14, 201270There are too many ebbs and flows, highs and lows, for this to be a great album, but one has to credit Spoek and Sub Pop for having the courage of their convictions, and trust in one another, to release such a genre defying album.
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Mar 14, 201270Father Creeper is his greatest achievement thus far, succeeding, if nothing else, as demanding listeners to enter his warped headspace.
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Mar 14, 201270It's got piles of ideas, some biting M.I.A.-style hooks, and all the grimy vibrancy of a night out in Soweto.
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Mar 15, 201267We've heard polychromatic African skitter-pop on American indie labels before, but never this naturalistic.
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Apr 2, 201260Father Creeper proves ambitious, but it's easy to get lost amid the clatter of African rhythm. [Apr 2012, p.98]
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Mar 26, 201260Mathambo is at best a serviceable singer-rapper, and the record is so all over the place, so mercurial from song to song and even bar to bar, a listener never gets a chance to settle in and grab hold.
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Mar 14, 201260When it works, as on 'Let Them Talk', it's a mongrel-pop joy. When it doesn't, as on the overloaded 'Venison Fingers', it's a mess.
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Mar 14, 201260Father Creeper is most certainly not a perfect record, the ride is a trek back in time to the fairground, riding the dodgems, and getting shunted, lumped and banged-up as sounds collide.
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Mar 14, 201257It is a wearying listen, overcrowded and too loud and too harsh, and to engage actively with it is to feel your knuckles whiten with effort.
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