Camp, London
If we've learned anything from the musical exploits of Russell Crowe, Hugh Laurie, Keanu Reeves with Dogstar and even Juliette Lewis, it's that the actor-turned-music-hobbyist tends towards the trad. A life reciting other people's words, it seems, trains one to be unadventurous in other arts. So when Donald Glover– actor in the NBC comedy Community, comedian, model and scriptwriter for The Daily Show and 30 Rock – announces that he wants to "burn this place to the ground" and then fulfils the metaphor, it's a satisfying shock. Under his hip-hop alter ego Childish Gambino, Glover has been releasing free albums and mixtapes online since 2008, culminating in his highly acclaimed first official release, Camp. This showcase gig – truncated because "I've got to go do a radio show" – finds him running the gamut of urban styles from the pastoral hip-hop poetry of Roots Manuva to the dark murder rap of DMX and the R&B rave of Tinie Tempah.
His lyrics rarely stray from the classic lexicon of hustling rap (loose women, easy money, hate songs to haters, tales of poverty told by a self-made success), but they're delivered with a preacher's intensity and a vaguely nerdy excitement. He's wide-eyed at the bedroom action he's getting on the soulful Fire Fly and dorkishly obsessed with Japanese girls on doomy piano ballad LES; he's a macking McLovin, so charmingly geek-hop you half expect the stormtrooping horns of UCLA to prelude a guest rap by Darth Vader. But whether he's trying an accomplished hand at Daft Punk electro (Heartbeat), symphonic trip-pop (All the Shine, Hero), apocalyptic bashment (Bonfire), or mashing feverish rasta beats into Adele's Rolling in the Deep, he seems rapt in rap's possibilities. In Keanu Reeves terms, he's less dog, more star.