The twelve tracks on Fine Art, the first album from hip hop trio Kneecap, storytell a drug-fuelled night in ‘The Rutz’, the imaginary pub setting of this concept album, unveiling an effortlessly bilingual, rapidly code-switching Belfast Irish-language world.

Six ‘interludes’ intersperse these tracks, opening a door onto the snug, the toilets, behind the bar or wherever the action is taking place. Irish traditional music swells briefly from a session elsewhere in the bar, underscoring each interlude. The traditional tunes ‘Toss the Feathers’ and ‘Munster Bacon’ soundtrack toilet-visiting discharges and illegal drug ingestion, disclosing a world in which rap, hip hop, traditional music and seán-nós unfold along the same musico-cultural continuum.

Fine Art is the follow up to Kneecap’s 3cag EP of 2018. ‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’, its first single that unleashed Kneecap onto the world in 2017, contains material for at least five songs condensed into just one. On Fine Art, with space for introspection, there is expansion and development, musically, rhythmically and lyrically, as each track in the story is incrementally laid out for the listener. The same dark humour pervades the lyrics of Fine Art, but its production reaches a more serious level – introducing a sophistication and stylistic diversity in collaboration with English producer Toddla T that transcends their earlier recordings.

Radie Peat’s distinctive vocals on the first track ‘3CAG’ shimmer over the sampling of Joe O’Donnell’s 1977 Celtic violin track ‘Caravan’. The album’s title track ‘Fine Art’ follows, an intertextual polemic against Kneecap detractors. Its audio sample from BBC Radio Ulster’s The Nolan Show drops lines from presenter Stephen Nolan’s disparaging report on the unveiling by Kneecap of a mural of a burning PSNI van. Kneecap’s response, ‘This is Fine Art’, is framed vocally by Nolan himself, lyrically by the song and graphically via the album cover – the eye and mouth holes of a black balaclava within a gilt picture frame. Kneecap self-interpret their actions as artistic, nuanced interrogations of extant ‘Troubles’ narratives and in one fell swoop they ridicule, subvert and delegitimise long-standing and uneven institutional power relationships that underscore their experience of society, as Irish-speaking Republicans in the north.

Irish-language writer and presenter Manchán Magan dons a druid persona for ‘Drug Dealin’ Pagans’ amongst the ‘powder, paraphernalia and fluids’. A cameo that elevates Fine Art to an even higher plane, this is not Magan’s first tryst with Kneecap – he previously recorded a spoken-word cover version of ‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’. ‘Harrow Road’ transitions the listener onto a different kind of ‘plane’, Aer Lingus this time, a late-night trip to London where ‘Móglaí Bap’s declared missing’ and rapper Jelani Blackman comes superbly to the rescue.  

Unlike any other
The title of the track ‘Parful’ is a phonetic celebration of accent. Quite unlike any other rap speech rhythm, the urban vernacular of Belfast in both Irish and English pulses throughout the album and forefronts identity. Kneecap’s Irish-language use is not the product of revivalist education policies in the Republic of Ireland, however, and Fine Art cracks open a window onto the Belfast Irish-language community. This community originated with the visionary West Belfast Urban Gaeltacht established in the late 1960s and has witnessed the growth of a community of language activists battling against the odds to establish and expand Irish-medium education and institutions, in a state actively hostile towards the language. The three members of Kneecap are the progeny of that activism. The brief ‘interlude’ rendition of ‘Amhrán na Scadán’, Tory Island’s signature sean-nós song, speaks to the intrinsic relationship between the rich culture of the Gaeltacht and the Irish language community of Belfast from which Kneecap emerge.

Highs and lows are successfully manipulated throughout the concept ‘night’ of this album; from the sampling of 808 State’s ‘Cübik’ in ‘I bhFiacha Linne’ with its violent, debt collection lyrics, to the enjoyment of the subsequent spoils in ‘I’m Flush’, and the ‘I’m k-holed off my head’ fast-lane of ‘Rhino Ket’. The mundane introspection of ‘Sick in the Head’ and ‘go fóill ag mothú cosúil le cac’ (‘still feeling like shite’) in ‘Better Way to Live’ with Grian Chatten is interspersed with Limerick vocalist Nino’s sparkling vocals on ‘Lovemaking’, if the song itself feels like the least best fit on the album.

‘Way Too Much’ with its joyful anthemic chorus is the highpoint ending of the night and therefore the album. Its sing-along group chorus of multilayered harmonies includes the singing voices of Kneecap themselves. There is an earnestness here, a momentary portrayal of vulnerability, similar to that which is fleetingly captured by ‘Amhrán na Scadán’, and it is nothing short of ‘parful’.

‘Ná déan anailís ar mo cuid línte’ (‘Don’t be analysing my lines’) demands the second line of ‘Fine Art’ making it a tricky call for reviewers! But regardless of satire, profanities or drugs, this is a Class A album and furthermore it is currently constructing international (not to mention national) listenerships for Irish-language hip hop. Right now, I’m on the same page as Radie Peat: ‘níl aon rud I’d rather do’ because there’s more to uncover on every listen.

Fine Art by Kneecap is available from Heavenly Recordings.