Clavish: Rap Game Awful review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week

There have been a variety of theories posited about the steady but inexorable rise of 23-year-old Cian Wright, from viral sensation – thanks to a 40-second clip of him leaning out of a car window, rapping with such so-what detachment that you keep expecting him to shrug – to the Top 10. He submits one himself on his debut mixtape as Clavish. “I don’t even rap,” he says. “I illustrate”.

Listening to Rap Game Awful, you see what he means. His worldview is strikingly drawn and bleak, devoid of politicking, expressions of anger at societal injustice or indeed optimism: this is just what it’s like, he seems to say, and it’s unlikely to change. Life on the streets is an endless, numbing round of cheffings and nittys and opps getting splashed, “anxiety through the roof”. Reputations are built on acts of violence that he seems to grasp are pointless (“What a goal,” he deadpans after describing stabbing a “little dickhead” while friends cheer his character on) and the fear of imminent death is constant. Jail, he suggests on Monday to Sunday, can feel like an upgrade, on the grounds that you’re less likely to get killed behind bars: “I’d rather them birded off than graveyard visits.”

Moreover, he implies that life as a hotly tipped rapper isn’t a vast improvement on his previous lot: “Streets is fake, rap game worse,” he snaps on Traumatised. In his telling, fame has only increased his paranoia – No Interview implies his disinclination to talk to the press has less to do with engendering an air of mystery than fear of attracting “evil ears” and “opening up to someone that don’t even care.” It’s trapped him in a dangerous no man’s land between his past and his potential future: “After my tape I’m going to go for my publishing, and you’ll still see me on my block,” he adds, glumly, “like an idiot”.

Meanwhile, you lose count of the number of times you hear about his drip, but there’s something oddly deadened about Rap Game Awful’s litany of labels, jewellery, cars and meals at Sexy Fish. Clavish compares himself to Charles Lee Ray, the serial killer in the Child’s Play slasher franchise, but the character he inhabits feels more like American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blankly reeling off lists of his expensive designer clothing. Sex invariably seems to be tainted with revenge – he’s forever bunking up with the partners of his enemies or former friends – or mistrust about his latest conquest’s intentions: “I’ve got groupies that don’t even know my songs,” he offers on 1 More Than 6.

All this is rendered in a genuinely skilled and original voice, the subtle idiosyncrasies of his flow pointed up by the guest appearances. The more slurred voice of Frosty, or D-Block Europe’s use of Auto-Tune, contrast with the clarity and precision of Clavish’s style. The raw, thrilling sound of rappers Youngs Teflon, Rimzee and Tiny Boost on 4 of Us, or Salford’s Jordan on Ideal World, act as a foil to the cool detachment of Clavish’s delivery: he never sounds like he is breaking a sweat, making horrible events sound everyday in the process.

But there’s a problem. You lose count of the number of times you hear about Clavish’s drip because Rap Game Awful is preposterously long: its 28 tracks last an hour and a half. It’s an issue compounded by the music. Aside from the atypically poppy Roll With a G, and some superb AOR guitar and Kaash Paige guest vocals on Tryin, it sticks to a wilfully limited, hook-free palette: mid-tempo beats, mournful piano figures and samples – Traumatised somehow manages to make the strings sampled from Sisqó’s Thong Song sound disconsolate – spectral electronics and warped vocal samples.

The sound successfully conjures a haunting, despondent mood. It’s frequently really well done – She Wanna and 4 of Us are particularly lingering – and flecked with nice touches, the reverse echo around Teeway’s guest appearance on Mariah Carey among them. But after a while, you can’t escape the feeling that one track is blurring indistinctly into the next and things are beginning to drag: it’s hard not to zone out, to look at the tracklist and wonder how there can possibly be another 12 songs to go.

Maybe that’s the point: after all, the world Clavish illustrates is a repetitious, numbing, interminable grind. “Let me tell you about my hood,” he says on No Difference. “You can put in work today but tomorrow nobody don’t care, because that was yesterday.” Perhaps it tells you something about how hotly tipped he is, that a major label doesn’t feel it necessary to suggest his mixtape could use a judicious edit, because they believe it’ll be a hit without one. You can see how Clavish ended up in that position: he’s abundantly talented, a singular and austerely powerful voice. But as Rap Game Awful proves, abundance can be a problem.

This week Alexis listened to

James Holden – Contains Multitudes
Holden’s new single is appropriately named. It starts out as loose dancefloor material, but gradually unfolds in unexpected directions and you end up somewhere very different, the route circuitous but scenic.