Sometimes, the ripple of an earshot can be heard around the world. The local is the expression of global conditions; global conditions are the percolation of circumstances that well up around one's feet where they stand, like the spreading overflow of a well with too many stones in its gut. There aren't many bands that can capture the feeling and sound of being from anywhere without losing the essential imprint of their place of origin- but I can certainly name a few- although one will do for our purposes here. Led by multidisciplinary musician and activist Martin Perna, Antibalas ("bulletproof," like an idea, like the soul, you can kill the vessel but you can't snuff its will) is a tour-tested and perfected, horn-driven, traditional Afrobeat band modeled after Fela Kuti's Africa 70 band and Eddie Palmieri's Harlem River Drive Orchestra. Like many Afrobeat outfits, Antibalas addresses dire social and political realities through positive, motivating, and cathartic party music. As Perna says, "We take a hard look into the past while forging a future of solutions." Their eighth LP, Hourglass, sees the band following the curve of inspiration back to intimately acquainted patterns of enlightened practice. Twisting back through time to tread fresh turf, the group has eschewed vocalist collaboration for this album, and singing nearly entirely, so as to avoid the demands and determinism that language and its expression place on sound, instead embracing the natural, untamed flow that a groove can take when players can intuitively delineate its coalescing contours, free of the constraining rib and hem of a singer's thread to tether its course. There is no exogenous plane to define itself against, no vista that exceeds its breath, no people who are beyond its borders. Hourglass is the sound of a world opened up from the inside, pried into a pluming dispersal and everted outward in all directions like the fresh, cloying flesh of a ripe orange spread open for the taking- refreshing, sweet, intricately textured, but most of all, free.
