SJ Esau made his Anticon-label release on March 13th with Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse. SJ Esau is Sam Wisternoff, who grew up in, and still is a native of, Bristol. He has a past history that is worth taking note of, when his sprawling soundscape of 12 tracks grows and grows on you until it unfolds in your head into a flowering masterpiece of understated composition. Yeah, it knocked me up out of bed, and I let it right on in.

He was half way through a four-year rap career, in the vibrant late eighties UK Bristol scene, at the impressionable age of ten. Yes, <i>ten</i>. He free-styled with 3D from Massive Attack at local parties, Tricky turned him onto Slick Rick and he was signed to a local label run by no less than Smith and Mighty, under the moniker of TFP. A lot to live up to? Well, yes and no. Sam has used this heady apprenticeship, and more, to become an artist who has made an album that knows the impact and importance of melody, timing and feel; creating atmospheres that tense and then languidly stretch out all over Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse. I like his titles too.

Combining humour in melancholy is both a lyrical and an artistic gift that SJ Esau
deploys collectively, with dexterous musical creativity. The infusion of drama into the slumped darkness of Queezy Beliefs. A paused quiet, then driving distortion, coupled with claustrophobic strings, that explodes on "Cat Track" (he has no balls), and, the nagging jabs of stabbing horns in "Geography" (donkey dancing in the bath) over and under subtle hints and light, deft touches of building, growing percussion, all show to great effect this deft touch. I defy you not to get drawn into the eddy and swirl of the swooning "Wears the Control", and, in a delicate, understated lope, become tangled in submerged sirens and underwater noises that somehow are competing with, yet complementing, a harrowing emotive vocal.