Plan B

Who Needs Actions When You Got Words in 2006 introduced Drew through an unusually stark mixture of acoustic guitar and confrontational rap. The sound left little distance between the listener and the situations being described. A guitar could offer warmth while the words made that warmth deeply uncomfortable. The album established a writer more interested in difficult scenes than in maintaining one reassuring musical personality.

The Defamation of Strickland Banks in 2010 seemed, at first, to offer a complete stylistic change. Drew adopted a soulful singing voice and a broadly cinematic setting for a connected narrative. “She Said”, “Prayin’” and “Stay Too Long” made the individual songs immediately accessible, while the album’s story gave them another role. The performance relied on character and dramatic movement as much as vocal style.

Ill Manors in 2012 returned to a much harsher sound alongside Drew’s film of the same name. The record used rap, samples and uneasy electronic production to address social conditions from several perspectives. Its title track was especially forceful, but the wider work depended on the connections between lives and circumstances. The ambition was to make the listener stay with people who might otherwise be reduced to a dismissive description.

These records are best heard as related approaches to storytelling, rather than evidence that Drew could not settle on a genre. The polished soul performance and the abrasive rap voice both create a position from which a story can be told. That flexibility is his defining musical quality. The setting changes because the emotional and dramatic demands of the material change, while the interest in human consequences remains.