NEITHER COLLAR NOR CROWN: VAGRANT REAL ESTATE PAINTS AN AUTHENTIC MONTAGE OF MODERN SCOTLAND

ALBUM REVIEW | NEITHER COLLAR NOR CROWN – VAGRANT REAL ESTATE by Bryden Churchmichael

The intro to Neither Collar Nor Crown opens with a voice telling you Scotland calls people back. By the time the album ends, you believe it.

Vagrant Real Estate is an Aberdonian producer who’s been doing this long enough that the praise has stacked up without the mainstream catching on. Ministry of Sound, DJ Mag, i-D, the BBC have all had their say. The Iceberg Theory, his 2022 collaboration with MC CLBRKS, sold out its vinyl run two weeks before it dropped. NCNC is the next move: 25 Scottish artists across one LP, drawing on folk, trad, Gaelic, grime, gospel and hip-hop. The instinct is the same. The scale is different.

VRE’s own description of his role is that he tries to create a canvas for people to voice whatever they want. That’s not a modest claim dressed as humility, it’s a production philosophy, and it’s what makes this record work. The beats shift to meet each artist without losing the album’s spine. Hip-hop and Gaelic folk and spoken word sit next to each other and none of it feels like a genre exercise. It feels like a place.

At the start of the eighteenth century, around 30% of Scots lived in the Highlands and Islands. By 1900 that figure was 8%. VRE opens his album with a voice saying Scotland calls people back. That’s what this record is made of.

Chelsea Frew‘s cover art says the same thing before you press play. A packed street scene, Bon Accord pub, mountains and cranes in the distance, a crowd of people going about it on green marble vinyl. VRE called Scottish music history something often viewed as having as much value as a highland cow on a shortbread tin. This cover is the answer to that. It’s the real thing, and it sets up exactly what the record delivers.

‘GO WITH THE FLOW’ hits early and doesn’t let go. Jackill, Katherine Aly, AiiTee, Florence Jack and Danny Cliff together over a beat that feels genuinely joyful, talking Scotland, talking identity, talking the particular feeling of being politically awake in a country that’s been told to smile and get on with it. Five voices, one feeling. The Lord Provost of Dundee said it in 1940: smile, get your happiness out of your work. VRE said it better. It’s the kind of track you want to put on in front of someone who’s never heard any of these names and watch their face change.

‘HOTB’ arrives lofi and trad and delivers the album’s sharpest line: ya canny get clean water when thurs poison in the well. It sits there without explanation. It doesn’t need one.

Then ‘PUBLIC HEALTH ANNOUNCEMENT’ hits and the album grins at you. “Scotland’s one of the few places left that cigarettes and fried breakfasts are still good for ye.” Then, quieter: “it’s a hard place to leave, you know what I mean.” That’s the whole tension of the record in two lines.

The Gaelic on this record isn’t decoration. It isn’t dropped in for texture. There are full bars in Gaelic, and when Jackill says if I spoke English ye properly couldnae hear me, it lands as both punchline and argument. As someone learning the language, that matters to me, not as a personal milestone but because the revival people talk about isn’t abstract. It’s in this album. It’s in a pub conversation. It’s in the street.

‘THIS IS HOW WE LIVE’ is the centrepiece. A wee girl talks about money and food and survival with the clarity that no politician manages, then it opens into spoken word about land and language and death and continuity. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote about a Scottish sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. This track is that, set to music. Mae Diansangu is a queer Black poet from Aberdeen whose work platforms the voices Scotland has historically talked over, queer, Black, feminist, in both Scots and English. Even in death we are alive as long as any of our kindred are living. Her voice lifts over Best Girl Athlete‘s gently strummed guitar and soft harmonies behind her, and VRE holds it all at just the right distance. Close enough to feel it. Far enough to let it breathe. It’s the kind of thing that makes you sit still.

After that stillness, Bemz and Sorley Mackay of Doss cut straight to it, a clip from a speech at Pieute’s birthday jam, the kind of thing you’d only clock if you were oan the street. Love thy neighbour. Not a question of country but a matter of class. Free Palestine. No softening, no framing. Then comes an apology for swearing. That contrast is Scottish as it gets.

‘BRIGHTER DAYS’ brings Jackill, Iona Fyfe and Viv Latifa in and it works because nothing on this record is trying to prove a point about genre. Then ‘ALL I WANT’ arrives with Jackill and Chef the Rapper and it’s the closest thing here to a Scottish Nas, harmonised vocals, unhurried, the kind of track that trusts its own weight.

‘TURN THE SUN BLUE’ closes with CRPNTR‘s spoken word and wind underneath it and that’s the right ending. For an album you don’t want to finish, it feels complete.

I didn’t know I needed this record. That’s not a criticism of my own taste, it’s a testament to what VRE has made. Scotland is a place people get pushed out of, told to leave, told to be grateful they got out. This album is the call back. Neither Collar Nor Crown doesn’t sound like anything else because it couldn’t. It took 25 people, two and a half years, and every bit of lived experience they carried to make it.

Darren McGarvey, Orwell Prize-winning author, called it “a modern Scottish classic.” He’s not wrong.

Neither Collar Nor Crown by Vagrant Real Estate is OUT NOW.