Sons of Kemet - Your Queen Is a Reptile (#1/5 Outside Albums of 2018)

I enjoyed doing this little series of posts last year about non-metal albums I enjoyed listening to, and I really wanted to do it again this year. And while a series of delays and breaks has pushed it back, I’m still going to try to do it this year, although they will likely be shorter this year because I still have a few metal albums to discuss before the year ends, as well as much longer year-summary best-of/worst-of lists.

I was very focused on my metal this year and it was much harder to decide which five other albums I should talk about this year, but I figured a good place to start would be with my favorite non-metal project of the year: Your Queen Is a Reptile by the British band Sons of Kemet. All other genres do take a very distant second place to my main musical love of metal, so my lesser immersion into them individually compared to those who revere them as their favorite is something I of course acknowledge, but this is definitely one of the most interesting jazz albums I’ve heard in a while, definitely this year, taking a boldly progressive, yet incredibly well-tempered and well-balanced approach to the sounds of African jazz. The album is largely instrumental, but it does have a few dramatically spoken passages interwoven into it, my favorite being the passage with the repeated line, “don’t want to take my country back, I want to take my country forward”, on the closing song “My Queen Is Doreen Lawrence”. The titles of the songs refer to significant black historical figures, but of course since the album is mostly instrumental, these titles serve as more of a dedication than anything else. Nevertheless, the music on here serves to tribute these historical icons rather fittingly through dynamic, varied, and captivating compositions. I like to say I usually like my jazz more on the violent side, with raucous soloing and breakneck speeds, especially when it comes to drumming and saxophone (definitely the metalhead in me), but most of the songs on this album take a much more meditative, if not wholly serene approach, riding out a central motif or a central drum beat that the rest of the instruments play around, like the sweetly calm “My Queen Is Nanny of the Maroons” or the subtle, yet groovy “My Queen Is Yaa Asantewaa”. Before I got into jazz, what turned me away from it was the restrained, elevator-type shit that just made me feel like I was in a pompous hotel lobby where you can’t touch anything, but what these songs are doing is nothing like that. They work to cultivate a contemplative mood just like snoozy elevator jazz is supposed to, but these songs keep the focus on the instrumental performances with compositions that still bend the rules of jazz to the favor of their subtle rebelliousness. Songs like the closer, “My Queen Is Angela Davis”, “My Queen Is Albertina Sisulu”, or the opener, “My Queen Is Ada Eastman”, though, do bring the energy up with louder and faster performances, bringing that important balance and that rush I personally love in my jazz. Overall, it’s not just my favorite jazz album of 2018, it’s my favorite non-metal album of the year, and one with quite a bit of the instrumental energy that I could see other metalheads getting into, nicely spaced out with more contemplative numbers in the mix to balance it out. I love this album, and it’s definitely been one of the biggest distracting forces pulling me away, even if only for a bit, from the heavy listening load of metal I’ve taken on this year.