Ibibio Sound Machine have put lockdown to good use and emerged with the best album of their career.
It’s a well-worn theme but one worth repeating: in the early days of lockdown, there was nothing worse than the people who pretended they were filling the vacuum with life-changing endeavours whilst most of us were staring out of the window contemplating which sweatpants to wear.
For mere mortals, learning how to play three new instruments and build a gazebo all within the first week of enforced incarceration might as well have been the moon.
Thankfully, Ibibio Sound Machine’s vocalist Eno Williams felt much the same as the rest of us, admitting that the process of creating their fourth and best album Electricity was one that moved at its own pace, task setting on the long days falling victim to the universal get out of procrastination.
The pandemic had more demonstrable impacts too, with the collective, even after working to their own pace, waiting a year for its release with a growing sense of impatience, understandably given that by any yardstick they’ve found a level beyond what could be defined as merely a new sense of purpose.
This was also the first time they’d joined up with outside producers since their 2013 formation by Williams and saxophonist Max Grunhard; working with Hot Chip, the collaboration was born out of mutual admiration fostered whilst watching each other on festival stages.
Any lack of energy contained within the flow is certainly not transmitted to the finished product, which takes the band’s ‘Afrofuturist’ precept and blends ancient and modern sounds with the melody and rhythms of northern and southern hemispheres, often to mesmerising effect.
Opener Protection From Evil ensures that their demand for our attention in a cluttered world is answered. Halfway through, Williams chants, ‘Spiritual/Invisible/Protection from evil’, as if sitting up bolt upright after experiencing a revelation, but what precedes that is a stream of Grace Jones-like consciousness, words spoken in tongues with the uber modernist electroclash programming making these contemporary spirits.
It’s a jarring start, coming partially out of the darkness of the last few years, from the ripple effect of George Floyd’s murder to the inversion of our once easier to navigate lives.
Williams adds to the thrill of uncertainty by alternating between English and Ibibio – which she spoke growing up in Nigeria – sometimes within verses, while the closer Freedom draws inspiration from the water-drumming rhythms of Cameroon’s Baka women.
Whilst there is a potency here which can’t be denied, Electricity is very much a record around dancing and the joy – now gradually being re-established – of being with people.
To this end there’s a more than good take on Scandi pop (All That You Want), avant-disco (Casio Yak Nda Nda), rippling electro funk (17 18 19) and quiet echoes of Tom Tom Club (Something We’ll Remember).
Perhaps the closing word goes to the album’s title-track, one which remains true despite language increasingly being used as a noose in which we can all hurt ourselves.
Over a warmly experimental, percussion heavy backdrop Williams sings, ‘Let me speak from the heart, without love/There’s no, no, no electricity’. The words say that without mutual heat, light and connection, we may as well all be locked away from each other for ever.
An album with roots in our own shared weaknesses, Electricity is a highly constructive depiction of what is possible with humanity.
Meanwhile, somewhere out there, a gazebo has fallen down in the rain.
