CD reviews: Lupe Fiasco

The last album from a tortured tenure at Atlantic Records sees mercurial Chicago MC Lupe Fiasco leave with a bang.

Tetsuo and Youth is a daring record, chock-full of meticulously crafted metaphors and quicksilver rhymes, with little coming close to the earnest mantras that plagued 2011's Lasers.

His hypnotically inventive wordplay is in effect on the stark Deliver and the clenched belligerence of the epic Prisoner 1 & 2, and coloured with calorific basslines, swirling sax solos, and a suite of instrumentals heralded by Fiasco as ''sonic palate cleansers''.

Utterly breathtaking.

• Lupe Fiasco. Tetsuo and Youth. Atlantic. 

Four and a half stars (out of five) 

Single download: Deliver
For those who like: the scope and ambition of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kendrick Lamar's way with a phrase

- John Hayden

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