Album review: Michael Kiwanuka - Love and Hate

4/5

In a remarkably forthcoming interview with the Irish Examiner earlier this year, Michael Kiwanuka spoke about the crisis of confidence that informed his second album.

“I’ve been marketed as a black soul singer, which is perhaps what I am,” he said. “But I don’t feel like that. In my head, where I grew up, I was more used to middle-class white England. That’s what I’ve been around all my life.”

From this swirl of confusion the 29-year-old Londoner has distilled a darkly soulful tour de force — searing in places and elsewhere bewitchingly introspective.

It begins with the remarkable ‘Cold Little Heart’, a 10-minute fever dream that proceeds from Pink Floyd-esque spirals of psychedelia to open-veined dirge.

This is the jumping off point for a project that alternately dazzles and beguiles.

Working with producer Danger Mouse, Kiwanuka — winner of the 2012 BBC Sound Of poll — references experimental r’n’b and jazz while at all moments blazing a searingly original trail. Occasionally there are call backs to his debut, Home Again, such as on the more-or-less traditional ‘Rule The World’.

But Love and Hate packs surprises too, as exemplified by ‘The Finale Frame’, a cinematic epic characterised by shrieking guitars and cloud-scraping production.

The emotional centrepiece, however, is the single ‘Black Man in A White World’, in which Kiwanuka seeks to reconcile his upbringing as the child of African immigrants with his standing as a singer-songwriter with an overwhelmingly white, middle class fanbase.

He tours Ireland in October, stopping off at Cork and Dublin. On the evidence of Love and Hate, these dates rank among the must-see performances of the months ahead.

• Michael Kiwanuka plays Cyprus Avenue in Cork on October 13, and the Academy, Dublin, on October 15.