Lonely Are the Brave

Blessed with a distinctive soulful voice which combines a faux-Jamaican accent with the Cockney twang of his Hackney birthplace and the Irish lilt of his County Wexford upbringing, 21-year-old Michael Stafford, aka Maverick Sabre, first came to attention fronting abrasive slabs of dubstep by Chase & Status and Professor Green. However, there's very little in the way of massive bass wobbles on his debut album, Lonely Are the Brave, which neatly fills the retro-hip-hop soul gap left by Plan B's recent ventures into other fields. Indeed, the melancholic dissection of "Broken Britain" on understated opener "I Need" could well have been the first chapter of a Strickland Banks follow-up, as could the stripped-back acoustic blues of "Shooting the Stars," a stinging attack on police brutality, and the doo wop-tinged "No One," a heartfelt riposte to an ex-girlfriend which appears to borrow the melody from Ms. Dynamite's "It Takes More." As authentic as the vintage Ronson-esque brass arrange