Scalper: The Shine (digital outlets)

Many years ago when his name was well known, I did an interview with the very funny and smart Thomas Dolby who'd enjoyed a hit with the catchy She Blinded Me With Science.

He'd abandoned England to live and work in the States and gave an interesting reason: in England people expect Morrissey to be miserable all the time but in the US they know the difference between the artist and the act.

No one there thought Alice Cooper ate babies when he was at home. Americans understood showbiz . . . but in England he'd been asked questions about science.

That distinction between the art and the artist is important, and problematic.

Consider how Van Morrison and Eric Clapton have alienated former admirers for their stands on Covid mandates and such.

Are they now cancelled? Is their best work to be forgotten or dismissed?

We mention this because Auckland's Scalper (Nadeem Shafi) can come off as a very forbidding figure and his albums – with titles like Flesh and Bones, The Beast and the Beauty – have always had a dark, baritone menace.

Yet this London-born Pakistani hip-hop artist – formerly of the excellent Fun-Da-Mental in Britain – has always been in Elsewhere's contacts scrupulously polite, genuinely appreciative of the coverage we have given him and in our recent flooding offering commiserations and kind thoughts.

That side of Scalper comes through with more clarity and a soulful consideration on The Shine, another album recorded in his home studio.

But this time it's personal.

After grieving the loss of his mother he has re-engaged with life and right from the heartfelt, downbeat but hypnotic opener Bismillah (“you're my mother, you're my father and I love you . . . blessings to you, as I greet you, as-salamu alaykum, peace be upon you”) sets the tone of an album which quietly celebrates the joy and pain of life, family and children.

He still addresses the darkness out there and inside us (the slippery and surreptitious Silence Speaks, the original Tainted Love and particularly its reprise) and his spoken word style will always have that deep gravitas.

But here a real sense of Scalper's deep humanity and gentleness comes through (Stars in Their Eyes, Toxicity Toxifies ameliorated by the children's voices) and the closing piece is I'm Life which -- despite it's ominous sentiment -- comes with a wonderfully yearning and elevating contribution from qawwali singer Nawazish Ali Khan.

With intelligent loops and samples, mesmerising beats and passages which are engrossing (the repeated melodic figure of The Game), The Shine is the Scalper album which provides a terrific entry point to a body of work that now stretches to five albums well worth discovering.

This is the Scalper album, one senses, where the art and the artist are in unique harmony.

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You can hear and buy this and other Scalper albums at bandcamp here.

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For more on Scalper at Elsewhere start here

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Scalper live photos by Barouf Menzotto and Romain Zawadski