The Mess We Made (Deluxe Edition)

With the Mess We Made, Tomas Doncker (ex Contortios) has produced an album with funk, jazz and soul influences and highly politicised lyrics. The record reflects social conditions in many of America’s large cities, racial tensions, and the often violent relationship between the police and urban youth. Doncker’s dissatisfaction with the status quo is on full display from the outset as he sings in the opening track about the media taking his faith away.

Last year’s The Mess We Made, a 35 minute dash through Black-America and its relationship with the culture, was a self-contained, concentrated analysis of urban life in the middle of the 2010s; a fearless artistic testament that seemed to need nothing in its deliverance of a clear eyed vision of institutionalized racism. Doncker, the CEO of the prolific multi-cultural independent True Groove Records, had made a classic piece of agitprop, a modern day There’s A Riot Going On. So what is left to say?