Few bands have been as indebted to a stylistic and philosophical predecessor as Antibalas are to Fela Kuti. Fewer still have been as capable of doing their predecessor justice-- after all, this is the band that was recruited to give some sonic verisimilitude to the original productions of the musical Fela!. And in repaying the stylistic debt they've owed to the originator of Afrobeat for over a dozen years, the Brooklyn band has spent a handful of albums proving that it's an art form that can not only survive but thrive, artistically and politically, outside the context of 1970s Nigeria. When they put out Who Is This America? in the midst of 2004's turmoil, it was a rhetorical question: This was music that knew the country all too well and demanded some sort of acknowledgement that their deepest suspicions were correct.
On surface terms, the self-titled Antibalas could be pegged to some particular agitated movement in current socio-politics, where matters of class struggle and disenfranchisement are played out in movements that ebb, flow, splinter, get pushed to the background, yet never really go away. But for many people, financial exploitation, misguided law enforcement, and unsatisfying materialism aren't any more prevalent than they were when Liberation Afro Beat Vol. 1 came out-- they're just more visible to people who wouldn't worry about it otherwise. Antibalas have used that inroads for a much-needed type of no-expiration-date protest music: They swap out didactic specificity for sneaky allegory, torn-from-the-headlines trendiness for generations of weight, and the catalytic spark of the freshly-minted young radical for the perseverance of the long-struggling citizen.
The first half of Antibalas is likely what's going to get the most play in that regard: it's here that frontman Amayo calls the most accessible shots as a protest singer, throwing a lot of weight behind a few simple truths. "Dirty Money" feels like it fits in the context of the current Occupy Wall Street sentiment-- the Muppet-y class-structure feud of its video hints at as much-- but the imagery of uselessly sinking coins tossed to a drowning man, as well as a quickly breaking rope of bills failing to keep a man from falling off the ledge of a building, could stand in for any long-running scenario where capital has tried to stand in for empathy and failed miserably. An allegory for the War on Terror, or the War on Drugs, or whatever war on an abstract concept that causes more grief than it prevents, "The Rat Catcher" is a fable about a man who sets up a trap that snares everything but the rats he intends to catch-- a trap that he keeps expanding until it inevitably locks him inside. (Even if he'd succeeded, "When you catch two rats/ Hundred gon' come/ And when you catch 100 /10,000 go follow.") And if the message of "Him Belly No Go Sweet" predates any of us-- a fine house and fine clothes don't make for a fine life-- it's still delivered through a voice that believes old truths can be the most energizing ones.
Behind that voice, however, Antibalas reveal another way to advocate for collective empathy: This is the band at its most forcefully communicative as a unit, playing together with an efficiency that lives and breathes with one-take composure. Over the years, Antibalas have slowly but surely whittled away all the other, subtler Latin, jazz, and funk influences that were threaded through their strain of Afrobeat. In the process, they've become both a little less idiosyncratic and a fair amount tighter-- predictably reliable, maybe, but not in a context where sudden detours would be worth throwing off listeners (or dancers) anyways. It's still clear in the album's first half, of course; the call-and-response dynamic of Amayo and the backup vocalists runs on the same clairvoyant, conversational momentum that lets the rhythm section spar with the guitars and the horns retort briskly to the keyboards.
This is a band still given to bracing solos-- Victor Axelrod's highwire-balancing organs and clavinets and the heavy slipperiness of Martin Perna and Stuart Bogie's saxes in particular have become definitive highlights-- but they click best as a mass of finely tuned parts. And in the latter three tracks-- the rousing Afrodisiac-caliber "Ari Degbe", the midtempo tension-and-release of "Ìbéjì", the controlled-frantic windsprint of closer "Sáré Kon Kon"-- it really comes to the forefront, sounding so second-nature that you take the complex interplay in the underlying grooves for granted. The fact that this album came from a mutual admiration of one particular forefather, and spread to a group where everyone shares some responsibility to do right by his music-- well, that's a statement in itself.
