Steve Mason – ‘Brothers & Sisters’ album review: The best music of his solo career
Since the implosion of The Beta Band in the early ’00s, Steve Mason has barely paused for breath, releasing a string of solo albums under various monikers and building up a devoted fanbase in the process. He’d be the first person to admit that he’s in an unusually fortunate position, and he has no intention of letting it go to waste. Mason’s first full-length album since 2019, Brothers & Sisters boasts some of the Scottish musician’s finest material in a decade and serves as a reminder that an artist’s best work is rarely created in isolation.
About The Light saw Mason at his most radio-friendly. “I’d just become a dad, and I felt this sudden weight of responsibility,” he told Far Out in a recent interview. “I realised I was going down this road of chasing radio plays. I was hoping for that BBC Radio 2 playlist.” If not already driving down that road, he certainly had his finger on the indicator and was about to make the turn. Then, suddenly, something dawned on him. “I remembered that I didn’t start making music because I wanted to become a great songwriter; I wanted to be an artist with everything that entails… Writing music should be about stretching yourself.”
Brothers & Sisters is, in many ways, a document of Mason’s creative rebirth. Early tracks like ‘Mars Man’ and ‘No More’ are murky and doom-laden but quickly unfold to reveal genuine vulnerability, as in ‘Pieces of Me,’ in which Mason navigates the enormity of love in all its forms with a few simple piano chords. For the most part, however, Mason opts for a more maximalist approach, stuffing as many sonic influences into songs as he can and collaborating with a range of artists, including Javid Bashir, gospel singers Jayando Cole, Keshia Smith and Connie McCall, and Adrian Blake and Kaviraj Singh.
“With this record, I wanted to celebrate all the things that immigration has bought to this country,” Mason says, “whether it’s a singer from Pakistan [‘No More’] or a gospel choir from Brixton [‘Brixton Fish Fry’]. If you think about it, the country as a whole is one giant collaboration. People coming from Bangladesh or Jamaica or Africa: they come here with all their stuff, they meet us, we’ve got all our stuff, we listen to what they’ve bought, they listen to what we’re doing, and you get stuff like The Specials.”
The Specials, this is not. Ska wore its politics like a badge of honour, whereas Brothers & Sisters is much more interrogative, holding everyone to account no matter which side of the divide they fall on. While it’s undoubtedly less anarchical than 2013’s mind-bending concept album Monkey Minds in The Devil’s Key, Mason’s latest album packs a much greater punch, primarily because of the clarity of Mason’s songwriting, which blends psychedelia, hip-hop, ambient, electronica, gospel, and ska without undermining his overall vision.
Brothers & Sisters is a challenging, provocative and immensely gratifying album. Most of all, it shines through as a confident artist giving it their all; that alone makes this melee emotive.