English Frank has had a far from ordinary music career. First his name changed from Frantic Frank to English Frank. Then followed his rapid success to then sudden fall. Most of Franks fans first locked into the London raised artist when SBTV released his famous Warm Session. The single video alone has reached a near 2.5 Million hits on YouTube and is arguable the best Warm Up Session ever. From there was a reported racial slur at a live show that left 1000’s of dedicated fans dishearten by their favourite artist. However time has passed, the misunderstanding has been resolved leaving one thing left for Frank do to. Reclaim his place at the top by releasing Frankenstein.
One element that UK artists normally find hard is to produce a track with the same passion and impact as an Internet Session video mainly due to the battle rap culture that UK Grime originated from. However English Frank has more of a Hip Hop influence that is mixed with the UK sound of aggression and passion in his voice. The voice is only part of Frank’s character as the words that are said hold to the true message and is what separates him from other artists. The lyricism is by far some of the most authentic and pure we’ve heard from the UK for quite some time. The track ‘150 Names‘ shows us what Frank can do when he has a concept on a track, as he mentions 150 artists names and he covers a wide spread of artists from the likes of Danny Graft all the way up to Wiley. Another highlight is Frank speaking about his life, spitting about his struggle whilst the lyrics themselves paint a detailed picture in the track ‘100 Bars of Truth‘. This track alone symbolises overall lyricism in the album as Frank’s constantly delivering hard hitting lyrics which paint a vivid picture.
Frankenstein does show how versatile English Frank is when it come to rap beats. The vast amount of urban sub genres used in the album is impressive. We stretch from ‘Dance With The Devil‘ with a tradition East-Coast beat all the way to a more modern sound of Trap/ Drill Music in ‘Lamina‘. The beats of ‘Any Genre‘ or ‘Goodbye‘ are dated. Especially ‘Any Genre‘ beat sounds like it could of fitted nicely on to Lil Wayne’s album Tha Carter 3. However regardless of the beat English Frank and the impressive performances from all the features, especially Big Nartsie in ‘Pain‘ make up for this.
Looking at the album as whole Frankenstein slightly lacks originality in the narrative but despite that it should be classed as a great album. When reviewing UK Hip-Hop we unfortunately and mistakenly end up comparing UK artist to the giants of the US, forgetting that USA Hip-Hop culture is couple of decades older than the UK’s. English Frank proves that the UK does not have to match the US but to build it’s own culture in urban music and Frankenstein is most definitely an important building block to achieve that.
