(2020) Obnox - Savage Raygun


Review:
Obnox is maybe America’s leading Afro-punk right now, but he’s a lot more than that. In the two-LP Savage Raygun, he once again gathers all the offshoots of Black music — rock, soul, psychedelia, hip hop, punk, electronics and R&B — and brings them together in hazy visions that distill 2020’s smoking wreckage into pure sensation. It doesn’t feel like syncretism, either, but rather the pure force of the African American experience expressed through diverse languages and style. Even the sampled guitar riff from Neil Young’s “Southern Man” (in “Young Neezy”) sounds like it belongs to Nox here, supporting his point that this moment, volatile as it is, reaches back through American history all the way back. In fact, if you’re looking for a song that encapsulates this summer’s violent energy — as COVID-19 and police brutality and massive protests collide and interact — let me suggest “Underground Timebomb” with its militant beat, its fist-raised chant of “Underground timebomb, below the street that I sit upon,” its ghostly wail of pedal-fucked psychedelic guitars. It’s Jimi Hendrix running into Curtis Mayfield at a punk fundraiser for Black Lives Matter and it could not be more now (or more five years ago or ten or 20, this stuff has been happening for a long time). Nox rifles through the style book, with a couple of tracks booming and swaggering with early hip hop bravado (“Party Starter,” “How to Build a Bum,” the truly incendiary “Cut Me a Switch”), others floating like the ghosts of punk songs heard through abandoned concrete in abandoned buildings (“Supernatural”), still others essaying a soul falsetto over banged and blasted R&R soundscapes (“Heaven”). There are a few intervals that remind me a lot of Dilla in the way they balance jazz and soul and hip hop in short instrumental bits. And yet, despite this diversity, Savage Raygun never sounds like a one of each, or a look what I can do kind of record. In fact, its power grows when you listen to it all end to end. It is one howl, one reminiscence, one statement of resilience all the way through. This is not just a good record or an enjoyable record, but a necessary one, the current murk of rage and hope and confusion distilled into blistering sounds.





Tracklist:
01 - Superdope
02 - Catbird
03 - Supernatural
04 - How to Build a Bum
05 - Blessed Black Soldier
06 - Heaven
07 - Misery
08 - Return Fire
09 - She (Was About That Life)
10 - Hawkwindian Summer
11 - Hugging the Block
12 - Avalanche Grave
13 - Cut Me a Switch
14 - Scenicide
15 - Concrete Rose
16 - Music Saves
17 - Underground Timebomb
18 - Party Starter
19 - Young Neezy
20 - Savage Raygun


Media Report:
Genre: alternative rock, electronic, psychedelic rock, soul
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits