Like all the greatest music Scott Lavene is all at once familiar and yet hard to place. A street poet delivering real life vignettes over wonk beats and scuzz rifts, he is a 21st century take on those maverick genius outsiders that Stiff Records used to release back in the punk wars. Lavene has the lyrical smarts and the fairground bark of an Ian Dury, the incisive wordplay of a Costello and the deadpan pop of Madness in his creative DNA, along with the street poetry of an Essex boy version of Lou Reed, the dislocated funk of Talking Heads, the jellied eel lyrical bounce of Chas and Dave, and the inventive surreal see-saw of a Tom Waits, and many other non-conformists.
It’s an intoxicating brew that he makes his own in this collection of wonderful quirky songs that make up Broke. These are songs that are full of detail and a life lived in scuffed shoes, rainy towns and the magic of the everyday. Songs about small talk, being skint, doomed affairs and the sweetness of falling in love over a cup of tea. Creating unconventional backdrops for his street tales Scott builds up shapeshifting rhymes and looping grooves.