It feels a bit serendipitous to move from Sun Ra to tUnE-yArDs’ "w h o k i l l", an album that floated about my peripheral vision until it shouted from the top of just about everyone’s best albums of 2011 list.
It’s an album that owes a debt to free jazz (“Es-So” and “Riotriot” most pointedly), but as there's a lot more musical of history between 1965 and 2011 – also David Bowie, RnB, soul, reggae and American Indie.
It also feels a very political album, dealing with sexual, gender, socio-economic politics as well as familial relationships and politics on a national scale. I don’t know if it’s because whilst listening to this album, I was reading and absorbing the very excellent "Divine Magnetic Lands" by Timothy O’Grady, but the album is also a state of the nation address, what it is to be an American in 2011. That’s how the album begins and erupts into our ears with “My Country”.
What I also like about the album is that it’s a very androgynous album – from one song to the next, the vocalist sounds either male (albeit a kind of Black Kids-falsetto male voice) or female, the topics that are discussed are about boys and girls. In Verse 2 of “Gangsta” we’re asked “What's a boy to do if he'll never be a rasta?/ Singing from his heart, but he'll never be a rockstar”, but by verse three the boy has become a girl.
Added to that, it does a lot for caps lock and punctuation too.
The album is eclectic with a capital E. It veers from sensual seduction on ”Powa” to pop-sheen on the lead single “Bizness” to creepy Angela Carter-esque nursery rhyme on “Wooly Wolly Gong”. “Doorstep” is an almost brutal indictment of the police force, and random acts of violence whereas the next song “You Yes You” opens with “Now that everything is going to be ok”. “Es-so, potentially dealing with familial incest, ends on a police siren which is then incorporated into the refrain on the next song, “Gangsta”. Sirens also recall those ethereal beings that sang to Odysseus in The Odyssey, which feeds into the seductiveness of “Powa” - indeed who has the power on that song? “Riotriot” begins like a teenage crush “I dreamt of making love to you”, except that the source of the crush is the man that put the narrator’s brother in handcuffs. “Bizness” is upbeat and instantly catchy, with the pleading refrain “Please don’t take my life away”. “You Yes You” reverts and distorts sight and listening, so that the narrator wonders if she’ll ever see sound and hear light – though ‘sound’ and ‘light’ are also antonyms for understanding and right-ness.
Everything on a global scale seems to be refracted and reflected through the personal; issues of love, racial politics, women’s rights over their bodies painted on large scales enter small places like bedrooms and neighbourhoods – on “My Country” : “My country, 'tis of thee / Sweet land of liberty /How come I cannot see my future within your arms”.
It’s an unsettling album that asks the listener a lot of questions – not just in the challenging lyrics but in the change of style from song to song. Each song powers through as quick as possible until you get to the sleepy “Wooly Wolly Gong”. Samples of found music, sounds, voices are peppered through the album, and from song to song it’s difficult to wrap my mind around whether tUnE-yArDs is a multi-vocal group or just one person singing and twiddling knobs – certainly when I read her biography on Wikipedia, it was *not* what I expected!
The album grows and grows with each listen, it challenges and divides but it also delivers just the right amount of pop, punch and power without growing bloated and bilious. It rightly deserves to be one of the best albums of 2011.
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