ALBUM REVIEW: Ibibio Sound Machine - Electricity
Easily the band’s most forward-thinking effort to date, with Electricity delivers one of the most vibrantly imaginative releases of the year so far.
For more than a decade now, Ibibio Sound Machine has modernized the funk strains that filled West African discotheques in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s by giving them an electro-dance makeover. With its rousing combination of disco, Afrobeat-influenced horns, Ghanaian guitar, Brazilian percussion, PlayStation sound effects, and nursery rhyme-like folktales in frontwoman Eno Williams’s native Ibibio language, the London-based octet has steadily perfected a unique fusion that blurs the lines between genres, continents, and time periods.
At various points on the band’s first three albums, we’ve gotten tantalizing glimpses of something like Blade Runner’s futuristic mishmosh of languages and fashion sense—only heavy on African flavors and a relentlessly upbeat groove. With their fourth album Electricity, however, Ibibio Sound Machine finally captures a sense of the future rushing through the doorway of the present.
Read my full review for Bandcamp here.
I’d add that the band has come up with a sound that doesn’t quite align with the scenes we find in dusty science fiction books, or with the tantalizing cyberculture reveries of the ‘90s—or even the techno-savvy ideas proffered more recently by Afro-futurism scholars like Ytasha L. Womack and Louis Chude-Sokei. The truth is that Electricity plots its own course into uncharted territory, and that the groove on “Casio (Yak Nda Nda)” makes the song feel like a sweaty dance party on a space station where there’s a broken alarm system wheezing incessantly and people just keep dancing — the perfect combination of machine-like rhythms and blood-pumping human presence that you just can’t deny. Such a rousing album!