The Line Is A Curve

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It is like a confessional as they communicate via a distinctive form of rap poetry that only they understand.

By contrast, some tracks on The Line Is A Curve do not succeed in drawing us in with quite the same impact, and that’s because they function in a fashion that is the polar opposite to both tracks discussed above. Tempest has described The Line Is A Curve as a more personal record and that is manifested visually from the outset, with their face adorning the album’s artwork. It chronicles the afflictions of everyday life and the pressure to overcome them—from the violent desire to dissolve into limerence (“Don’t You Ever”) to breaking patterns of generational trauma (“Smoking”)—and ultimately counsels that we make peace with our daily adversities.Products shown, tagged or featured on YouTube by creators are sold by merchants and are subject to merchant's terms and conditions. On every album they release there is at least one song that towers above everything else and makes itself the centrepiece and this time it is the hypnotic, mesmerising, and beautiful ‘Salt Coast. This is Tempest’s show, but musicians who have been playing with them since they first began gigging provide little smatterings of drums, guitar, tuba, cornet, and french horn.

More Pressure, the penultimate song, is the essence of the whole album and the epiphany that leads to Grace, which is a prayer, a surrendering; ‘Please move me, please move through me, please unscrew me, please loosen me up. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.

Tempest and Carey have spent the last several years learning from the studio guru, using their time at Shangri-La trying to reconstruct the relationship between Tempest’s intricately polysyllabic verses with Carey’s post-dubstep productions.

It’s a daily operation to increase your resilience, cultivate a deeper acceptance, let go of what’s chasing you and lean in to the pressures. Starting from a place of isolation and dejection, Tempest ends with community-facing lightness and love. Tempest’s work is at its most profound when the cadence and rhythms embody those of the spoken word. Exit Strategy’ was produced by Bernard Butler and part-recorded here across Studio Three, the Gatehouse and Writing Room Three. The pressures of maintaining relationships, of battling illness, addiction, poor mental health, the vacuous life of our online selves.The Line Is a Curve is their fourth album and their most grounded to date, with songs that blend electronic, pop-rock and hip-hop. Carey and Tempest repeat this formula on The Line Is a Curve: As Carey’s synths brood, Tempest explores a whole poetry anthology’s worth of meters. The album plays like a chronicle of pressures - the mind-numbing pursuit of a comfortable life, the eternal striving for more, the pressures of the city, the country, the times. But as Tempest examines the stop-and-go motions of being, it also feels like they are asking what it feels like to be alive, period. As lyrics that focus on making the most of what you have today, a key Tempest tenet, the sounds of French horn, cornet, and tuba create an increasingly claustrophobic cacophony that puts me in mind of a dark room, couples holding hands at candlelit tables, men in fedoras, women in ball gowns.

For me, it is an absolute joy to see them putting out music that brims with such belief and confidence.

Now comes their fourth album, The Line Is A Curve, and pleasingly it marks yet another step forward.