Recognize The Presence Of My Ghost

Kate Tempest “Ketamine for Breakfast”

Kate Tempest adapted her last album, Everybody Down, into a novel. It’s a rare album that could logically make that transition between art forms – Tempest’s lyrics are dense and vivid, and she’s extremely good at detailing the inner lives and complexities of her characters. If anything, the adaptation seems redundant. Her new album, Let Them Eat Chaos, is written and performed in the same style, but if she were to adapt this one into another medium, I’d hope it’d be film. The premise of the record is that it’s all taking place at the same time in the wee hours on a block in South London, and the songs are like a camera panning around and zooming in and rewinding on all the people there. “Ketamine for Breakfast” focuses on Gemma, a woman who may or may not be recovering from addiction, but is at least telling herself that she’s not as bad as she used to be. Tempest drills down into her psyche in just a couple minutes, but a lot of the detail is carried by images and flashes of memory. People describe records as “cinematic” all the time, but this is a rare piece of music that seems directly influenced by the narrative and editing logic of film.

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