Visuals: Jamie T – Chaka Demus

Jamie T – Chaka Demus

All in all, Jamie T has had a successful year. No, he’s not maintained the heights he managed to reach with beer-swigging anthem ‘Stella’ but he’s achieved more critical acclaim than before and the fanbase is gradually becoming more loyal by the day.

The video for ‘Chaka Demus’ has mimes driving pretty fast on country roads in America with Jamie T in the backseat looking pleasantly unfussed.

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Visuals: Jamie T – The Man’s Machine

Jamie T – The Man’s Machine

mp3//

The affirmed highlight of ‘Kings & Queens’ arrives in technicolour, as cheeky Jamie T rides golf carts, walks the streets and just generally “hangs out”. This is a fantastic choice for a single, and hopefully the big-time DJ’s will take note and get playing.

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Jamie T: Kings & Queens

ALBUM REVIEW: Jamie T – Kings & Queens
words: Jamie Milton

It’s difficult to judge whether Jamie T is really just a normal, fun-loving chap who gets into the occasional post-drinking scuffle and spends a lot of his time on Tube Stations. Now that he’s essentially quite famous, he might come under “Skinner syndrome” whereby an artist that likes to write about ‘modern life’ suddenly finds they’re no longer an everyday citizen and thus gets a bit stumped for new material. Perhaps Jamie Alexander Treays considered this as a potentially harmful knock on his career, therefore headed down to Soho/Hackney/(insert urban London area here), got out the four pack of Stella Artois and “chilled out” for a bit. It’s interesting because surely Jamie T no longer crawls the streets, arm-in-arm with his best mates. Yet on ‘Kings & Queens’ he maintains this everyday persona without even a nervous twitch, and it benefits the album big time.

Sometimes he’s required to speak in the past tense about his stage of rebellion, particularly during ‘Sticks & Stones’, an anthem that you imagine defining a few 15 year old’s summers this year. Wit is first truly introduced to the record with the line “I was ten a day, how’d you say, little shit”, and an elaboration of his youthful years is backed up by pulsating pace and one of the finest choruses in his already boastful catalogue. In fact, every single song on ‘Kings & Queens’ is encompassed by a killer chorus, from the arms-in-air ‘Man’s Machine’ to the slightly amateurish but affecting ‘Emily’s Heart’. And the ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’-meets-FrYars chorus in opener ‘368′ may appear grating to some, but to the naked eye is a stroke of genius.

‘Kings & Queens’ has somewhat subsidised tales of K Cider and the girl next door with bigger, bolder statements about current events and politics. And that’s not to say Jamie T will be the next spokesperson for Al Gore’s environmental-change campaign, because he’s certainly not attempting to speak volumes about cutting edge issues. Instead, he takes pride in his British-ness during the light-hearted, Jackson 5-esque ‘Chaka Demus’: “Two World Wars, and one World Cup, screamed by the desperate, divided crutch,  used to have an Empire then we grew up. Lost everything, who gives a fuck?”, and only on ‘Jily Armeen’ does he truly expose personal sensitivity: “You always went for my friends and not for me…”, that being a quite telling closing line.

It’s this savvy combination of both everyday Jamie with a-little-bit-famous Jamie that makes ‘Kings & Queens’ quite so grown-up sounding. Jamie T probably had plenty of decisions to make before writing this follow-up to ‘Panic Prevention’, an adreneline-packed, generation-defining debut that made him such a household name. Does he opt for a more mature package or does he stick to the routine? Head one way or the other and fans might have turned their backs. Here he quite remarkably stays firmly put as the musician you’d most like to have a drink with, as well as steadily inputting a new, more well-balanced and grown-up agenda.

8.3

mp3: Jamie T – Sticks and Stones

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