Buraka Som Sistema play kuduro, an Angolan take on dance music that's an example of what British critic Matt Ingram calls "Shanty House": urbanized, globalized street and club music splicing hip-hop and rave DNA with local mutations to create dynamic pidgin sounds. Kuduro, which mixes rai and soca rhythms with local MCing and salvaged electronics, is the product of the same kind of environment and pressure that produced baile funk in Rio and kwaito in South Africa-- musics which make good touchpoints for kuduro's breakneck appeal. It was born in the Angolan capital Luanda and quickly jumped along post-colonial transmission lines to Lisbon, home of Buraka Som Sistema. The Buraka sound has been picked up by global tastemakers like Diplo and M.I.A., and debut album Black Diamond gives the crew an opportunity to show how kuduro works at fuller stretch-- and whether it can survive outside its specific locality.
Kuduro is a pun on Angola slang for "hard ass"-- much of Black Diamond takes this as an operating principle. Buraka Som Sistema tracks often have the marvelous thickness of early jungle, that sense of pushing through electronic thickets, senses on hyper-alert. But their rhythmic template is more often the relentless bounce of soca. Soca's perpetual chirpiness makes it an acquired taste, but there's no denying its kinetic power, and blended with Buraka's harder beats and harsher sounds it becomes a fearsome engine for their music. The first few tracks are both introduction and pummeling workout-- the frantic M.I.A. team-up "Sound of Kuduro" sets the tone for highlights "Aqui Para Voces" and "Kalemba (Wegue Wegue)", which are less chaotic but even more exhilarating.
Opener "Luanda/Lisboa" starts with a keyboard throb that sounds like a generator powering up to the band can get enough juice to even play, and what's so attractive about the album is its constant flirtation with collapse-- everything's so furious, so quick-changing, so ramshackle that its tracks sound half-improvised. New riffs, bleeps and blurts constantly intrude, upsetting a tune's direction: the transitions between tracks are more like collisions. A song like "IC19" spends a while groping for a viable rhythm before rattling off on a chassis built from old school rave, dodging blasts of electro like oncoming traffic, before suddenly switching into the trancier, dirtier "Tiroza". Which in turn breaks down into what sounds like Portuguese folk music played on a crackly radio, a tune that becomes the digitally-tweaked basis for "General"-- a song that halfway through bursts into a gloriously goofy ringtone melody.
"General" is a good example of the group's more playful and atmospheric side, which emerges again when the tempo drops on the two-part "New Africas": their rumbling drum patterns show that the group's electro-world fusions survive a change in pace, but the somewhat mystical voiceover is an uneasy fit with the rest of the record's sharpness. Then again, not speaking Portuguese means I can't get the political references which are a big part of kuduro's Angolan appeal. As a sop to tourists like me, DJ Lil John has talked in interviews about how the band treat the voice as a percussive instrument, and it's an approach that works, with Kano's anglophone guest spot on "Skank & Move" an unwelcome spell-breaker. But even if you don't have the language skills to get their full story, Buraka Som Sistema are worth your time: Black Diamond is one of the fiercest dance records in recent memory.
