Albums of the Year # 9 Benjamin Clementine - I Tell a Fly

Interestingly, this was not in any Best Albums list that I saw given the accolades his previous had heaped upon it. But I preferred I Tell a Fly. I thought it was a bold and brave record. Here's what I wrote back in October:

The second album from Benjamin Clementine, I Tell a Fly. Not something I expected to be enthusing about or advertising on here but I feel obliged. Because I think it's quite brilliant. Barmy but brilliant! This comes two years after Clementine's debut album At Least For Now which won the Mercury Music Prize and had critics prostrating themselves before him. But whereas that record made me cringe, this one leaves me open mouthed with admiration and wanting to listen to it again as soon as possible to try to work out why I like it so much. So why is that?

I thought that At Least For Now was nouvelle cuisine for the chattering classes. Elegantly arranged on top drawer porcelain but ultimately pretension warmed up. It still sounds like that to me. When I heard that I Tell a Fly was a concept about two flies in love, I thought that actually listening to it would probably make me gag and so made no plans to do so. However, I gave it a go the day before yesterday and instead after several plays I think it's sublime. So why is that? 

For starters, mannerisms. Clementine is about as mannered an artist as you will ever come across. But whereas I found the mannerisms on At Least For Now empty and affected, suddenly on I Tell a Fly Clementine has hit his voice and his stride. For me its as if he's emerged from a chrysalis. It's pretension put to the best purpose. Towards the creation of art.

So where are the precedents for this. An autodidact, inspired by Anthony & the Johnsons, Eric Satie and surely, whether he likes the comparisons or not, (and I've read that he doesn't), Nina Simone. Writing and fronting an album that's so ridiculously ambitious it's surely going to be either a triumph or a catastrophe. He sings about the camps in Calais, he sings about Brexit, he sings about bullying, he sings about the turbulent current state of the world. And he sings about it all in such an arch comic utterly exaggerated and frankly comic voice or more accurately a whole sea of them,  that you're obliged to form an opinion on it. Indifference is frankly not an option. He holds absolutely nothing back over the course of eleven tracks, is utterly uncompromising, and certainly, certainly produces a record that is not coffee table music whatever else it might be.

Many people will be instantly repelled. The album will surely sell less than At Least For Now. It's impossibly stagy, almost operatic in its scope and scale and many more will peg Clementine as a deranged poseur. But it's partly its ludicrous scope that most appeals to me about I Tell a Fly. It puts him in the company of the most ambitious pop artists we've had; Bowie of course, Scott Walker, Jobriath, Jacques Brel, Billy Mackenzie and I'm also minded of Kevin Coyne, one of the most bloody minded singer songwriters of all. Clementine is certainly astonishingly bloody minded himself. I wish him all the luck in the world!