It’s taken a long time to deliver this debut album. Given events, it’s surprising it was made at all. Eastbourne-via-London rappers 404 Guild are a quartet but once they were five.
Three years ago, they lost their only female member, Mina, known as Silvertongue. She took her own life.
Mina was the daughter of Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird, co-creators of 1995’s sublime, game-changing Maxinquaye LP, and also the effective musical parents of the whole group, whose muttering, eerie aesthetic descends directly from that record.
Understandable, then, that False Dawn should have so melancholy a title, that the band should see it as ‘a flag stuck in the ground at the end of a long dark road’.
This metaphor – of a quest – suffuses the whole record. It is a world entirely within itself, one as redolent of the poets of the mystic and the divine as it is of video games and fantasy fiction, and it holds together as a stunning piece.
They speak in fables. Not once do you feel they are in over their heads. They might not have intended to evoke John Milton or William Blake – then again, they might – but either way, they do.
For all its gloom, False Dawn sparks and flames with fierce invention – and even, just occasionally, exuberant optimism. Never more so than on New Health, a track of gobsmacking originality and power, in effect a highly creative rap outfit imagining how a deep house revision of an archetypal Waterboys anthem might sound.
False Dawn proves anything but; this is a true sunrise for a remarkable collective talent.
