Album of the week: Rusangano Family - Let The Dead Bury The Dead

They may not have quite realised what they were doing, but Rusangano Family have timed this release to perfection.

Coming at the end of a season when we showed that we’re the best small country in the world to look back and remember and reflect and commemorate and all that jazz, this is an album dealing with the issues which didn’t get a look in then, but which definitely require some attention.

There have been previous releases from this collaboration between Co Clare rappers God Knows and Murli and producer John Lillis AKA MynameisJohn, but none has had the same richness, bite or snap.

An album where questions about identity, equality and diversity loom large, Let The Dead Bury The Dead is an album which feels more 2016 than other Irish release around at present.

Members of immigrant families from Zimbabwe and Togo respectively, God Knows and Murli trade lines, yarns and stories about what it’s like to arrive in a new land and feel out of place.

More pertinently, they also deal with the identity crisis of feeling just as out of place in the traditional settings of their family home because of trying to fit in and adjust to new surroundings.

As producer, Lillis has found a sweet spot where the funk of the sounds and the samples is perfectly calibrated for the heft of what the MCs have to say. On Kierkegaard, Love In A Time Of War and Surviving the Times, God Knows and Murli deliver beautifully turned out rhymes about the personal and the universal. Their flow is razor-sharp, the words hitting the spot again and again. As state of the nation addresses go about the state of this particular nation after the wreaths have been laid and the speeches made, it's quite a belter.