Sons of Kemet - Your Queen is a Reptile ALBUM REVIEW

This is my first official review here on First Glance, and I hope to make a strong impression with it, though if I don’t, truly, you can tell me. Honest, I won’t bite.

I haven’t been very hip to the jazz scene, and in fact, I wouldn’t consider myself to have been heavily interested in “cool” music until a couple of years ago. Up until then, I was mostly spinning super radical and definitely not unnecessary CD mixtapes of Foo Fighters, Green Day, Jimi Hendrix, and Coldplay. And, hey, you know what, I’m not hating on any of those guys. There are times and places to be fans of any of those names, particularly Hendrix, but the point is that my musical palate was incredibly close-minded and, well, white dad-ish. As I developed, I slowly got into more alternative, indie, jazz, hip hop, experimental and psychedelic music. And now, here I stand as a 21 year old man closer to his college graduation than he can possibly stand, listening to one of the groovier, funkier, weirder, and energetic-er jazz records that I’ve heard this year. 

This blog is all about reviewing albums on first listen, I will never repeat a listen to an album, which can make it hard to really delve into some of the more complicated things that make an album high quality. But from what I’ve heard on this Sons of Kemet record, it’s a really solid first impression. The drum beats are groovy, they get me swinging my body in a hypnotic way that I didn’t know was possible, and the winds really hold down the fort as a solid unit at the same time that the two lines (tuba and saxophone) are constantly shifting back and forth between melody and support. It’s like they’re weaving some kind of intricate pattern not only with the music, but in the sonic space that they take up. It gives the music a texture that I haven’t heard very often before, and that’s very exciting.

The intro and outro tracks have some interesting spoken word segments, and it’s really intriguing to me that a British Jazz combo like Sons can have such a rich and genuine lineage between its different members. You can hear a lot of influence on this record from loads of different countries and ethnicities’ cultural music, and the subject matter, vibe of the album, and even the name of the band leads me to believe that this doesn’t come from a place of awkward admiration and appropriation, but from a place of authenticity. As someone who is perhaps not as seasoned as many of his musical journalist compatriots, it’s exciting to my white-bread-and-mayo palate to hear such strange ideas explored so comfortably and so easily. 

The record isn’t too short and isn’t too long, it comes along, does exactly what it wants to do, and then cleans up shop when it’s through with you. This is a problem that I actually feel a lot of popular artists nowadays have. It’s all about selling a couple of singles, but for the album, they stuff it full of as much content as it can possibly hold, without a whole lot of attention paid to pacing, flow, or quality over quantity. When a band keeps their material short and sweet, only taking as much time as they need to to fully realize their creative ideas, it shows that they know how to efficiently plant mind seeds--get in, do the work, get out, easy peasy lemon frebreze-y.

Those are my thoughts on this record. And so, now, I suppose I should explain the scoring system I’ll be using here on First Glance. Scores are set on a scale from “Best of the Year” to “Trying to Unhear,” which looks like this:

Best of the Year Top Shelf Will Listen Again Give It Another Shot Not Worth Another Try Will Actively Avoid Hearing Again Trying to Unhear

I feel these scores are pretty self explanatory. So, to cap off my first ever official review for this blog, I give Your Queen is a Reptile by Sons of Kemet a score of “Will Listen Again.”