Album Review: BRASS
There needs to be a new word to describe what happens when billy woods and Moor Mother come together. Synergetic? Dynamic? Electric? All feel woefully inadequate. The idiosyncratic musical performances on display throughout the entirety of BRASS urge listeners to rethink the relationship between language and sound. Both artists are known for pushing the boundaries of hip hop with esoteric dexterity. A lot has been written about the esoteric first track, “Furies,” which was released by the duo as an Adult Swim single last summer. It’s as if the listener is being led into a drumbeat ritual where time, space, knowledge, and representation collapse into a smorgasbord of sensation. Moor Mother and billy woods make it immediately apparent that they are conjuring something mystical.
The soundscapes on BRASS are dimensional. It was western colonialism that introduced the idea of linear time, and as a sonic accompaniment to Moor Mother’s concept of Black Quantum Futurism (BQF), the album turns history, myth, and fantasy into allegories of the present. Take billy woods on “Giraffe Hunts” when he says “Traffic stop, I reach for my slave pass slow.” The plantation is everywhere in black time. The affective allure of the pair’s music stems in part from their disinterest in raising awareness. They treat history not as a coherent, singular whole to be disseminated to their listeners. Instead, it is an amalgamation of unstable pieces of information, morphed through repetition and lyrical necromancy into penetrating bars. Moor Mother does this brilliantly on “Maroons,” where she takes Biblical references to Ham and mashes them against climate change and the Hottentot peoples.
The sounds are simultaneously uncanny and perplexing. On the de facto mid-album interlude “Mom’s Gold,” we are witness to a muted trumpet and distorted noise competing against a chilling stand-up sample from 20th-century actress and comedian Moms Mabley. This is what jazz would sound like on a maroon encampment in a cyberpunk dystopia. Moor Mother demonstrates her finesse at riding the seam between spoken word and rapping, as she captivates over rhythmic percussion and synths on “Tiberius.” A more traditional rap verse on album closer “Portrait” finds Moor Mother with bludgeoning bars like “Came to the show with the severed head of a demon/Screamin, y’all ain’t fuckin’ with me I ain’t fuckin’ for free,” over a clean jazz loop.
We have this collective understanding – likely owing to the Bible’s final chapter Revelations – of the apocalypse as a catastrophic destruction. Scenes of calamity and the final hours of existence. However, the origins of the word are instructive. “Apocalypse” traces back to the Greek apokaluptein, which means to ‘uncover, reveal.’ When I say that BRASS is truly apocalyptic, it is this definition that I am invoking as opposed to the colloquial usage of the term. This sensibility is a particular purview of black music. This is because black people have been living in a 500+ year general apocalypse; the best of our music is an uncovering of that truth. In this way, the album joins recent standout projects like Earl Sweatshirt’s Feet of Clay and Black Noi$e’s Oblivion. Instead of the movement music from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, we are being treated to a soundscape for the end which is already/happening/just off the horizon.
As a whole, reviewers don’t know what to do with this album. It is impossible to listen to this album and not know that it is something special. At the same time, it is a dense, critical piece of art that is impossible to casually digest. The type of black ass art that is easy to fetishize as a work of genius while simultaneously critics refuse or fail to garner the tools to engage its complexity. I will have to return to BRASS in other written pieces, as I have only scratched the surface with this review.
Rating: 9/10