In 1998 Saul Williams won the Camera d'Or at Cannes for Slam, a film that he co-wrote and starred in. He was similarly rewarded for his idiosyncratic poetry recitals during the 1996 Grand Slam Championship at the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe in New York. He was featured on volume one of the hip-hop compilation Lyricist Lounge alongside Mos Def and Common. And now, according to the title of his debut album, he is an aspirant Amethyst Rock Star.
He appears here fronting a four-piece band (guitarist, keyboard player, drummer and cellist) capable of thrash metal, brooding dub rock, even rudimentary drum'n'bass. Wearing an upwardly mobile Afro fright wig and an intense stare, he alternates between rapping, reggae toasting, singing and - unusually - poetry reading. Very fast, very manic, yet very actorly poetry reading. Williams's warp-speed delivery over the skittering rhythms of Penny for a Thought makes it sound as though he's gabbling chunks of Shakespeare to a Roni Size beat.
On CD this works, at least in bursts, and it even makes for quite riveting listening, thanks to Rick Rubin's anthracite-hard production. Live, the players are barely up to the task of replicating the complex time signatures and sudden gear shifts of the music. Individually proficient they may be, but together they rarely gel, and their leaden performance makes a lot of the songs sound like bad progressive rock with rhymes on top: Spinal Rap, anyone?
After the shock of Untimely Meditations, its sparsely accompanied lysergic visions recalling nothing so much as Jim Morrison and the Doors' Horse Latitudes, it all starts to sound routine. Om Nia Merican could be late 1980s black rock band Living Colour, even early 1980s black rock band Bad Brains. The 11-minute Wine does nothing Prince didn't achieve on Purple Rain. On LaLaLa, Williams invokes the spirit of Jimi Hendrix, but the track has more in common with Lenny Kravitz's Let Love Rule.
Critics are already casting Williams as a latter-day Gil Scott-Heron, all focused rage and socio-political observations set to infectious rhythms. But with his talk of "invoking the muse", his declarations that "chaos is my concubine" and his endless streams of consciousness, Williams cuts a rather ridiculous figure.
Worse, his scattergun verbosity is like being harangued by someone who wanders the streets in a sandwich board declaiming the moral bankruptcy of all mankind. Hallucinatory whimsy is one thing; sanctimony is quite another. Especially if you can't dance to it.
