Review: Ghostpoet, Marble Factory

Ghostpoet is not gutted to have missed out on the Mercury Music Prize. “Thing is, when you win things like this, then you have to make something amazing,” he says, head cocked over the microphone with a smile. “You can’t just make something shit,” he tells the crowd at the Marble Factory, just a few days since he was standing on stage watching Benjamin Clementine take the coveted award for album of the year.

You can’t help but think this may have been the hottest ticket in town had his Shedding Skin record been selected by the judges. Instead, the gig is an intimate affair – with real fans – where there is room to move on the dance floor. Another silver lining, perhaps.

Shedding Skin is not the first of Ghostpoet’s – real name Obaro Ejimiwe – albums to have been nominated for the prize. First record Peanutt Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam was also shortlisted in 2011, losing out to PJ Harvey (the only person to have won it twice).

But the new work marks a gradual departure away from the driving, haunting and sometimes minimal, grimy beats which brought the artist to the fore last time around.

The emphasis is now on synth and guitar arrangements with delicate female backing vocals giving more fullness and depth in support.

It translates live well, and brings out a different side to the normally pretty static Ejimiwe, often seen hunched crooked over the microphone with one hand hovering over his echo effects pad and the other pushing up those thick round glasses and wiping his bald head.

X Marks The Spot, the second track off the new album and third on his set list, sees Ejimiwe reeling away from the front in appreciation of his band, turning to pump his fists to the drums and lunge to the guitar rifts. By the time we reach final track Off Peak Dreams, he is absorbed on stage.

But it is not all new work. The set is a balanced showcase of Ejimiwe’s talent and range; drifting in and out of all three albums through the melancholy of Survive It, from the first album, to the crescendos of MSI musmiD, from 2013’s Some Say I so I Say Light, and back around to the almost Bristol Sound melodies of That Ring Down The Drain Kind Of Feeling, from Shedding Skin.

Backlit and hunched in the smoke, Ejimiwe brings the set to a close in front of an admiring audience. “I love this place,” he says of Bristol, recounting his day spent trying out being a blacksmith, apparently. No stranger to the city, he has headlined Love Saves the Day in the past and played a one-off gig in the Anglican Chapel of Arnos Vale.

His departure from stage is short-lived, and an encore is reserved for old material, rounding off a stirring and impressive performance with Us Against What Ever and perhaps his best work to date, Liines. Mercury Prize? What Mercury Prize?

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Top picture from villunderlondon.