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| Popmatters |
 Spare. Dark. Relentless. On Komba, the second album from Portuguese dance collective Buraka Som Sistema, fierce club beats propel everything forward like time’s ever-rolling stream bears us all away. Buraka don’t do pretty melodies, sweeping synth riffs or major keys. They don’t do much in the way of lyrics, and they make no overt concessions to human emotions, except those concerned with kinetic body motion. The album cover is a grinning skull floating over a sea of black—you don’t go into it expecting Deadmau5.Look closer at that skull, a painting by the Brazilian artist Calma, and the cover becomes a little more reassuring. The skull exhibits evidence of humanity: a sinking ship, a pipe, a key with a little cross carved into it, a decapitated chicken. Things are looking up! And once you move past the nonstop rawness of Buraka’s songs, you’ll find ample evidence of life-affirming humanity embedded in their music. They lavish their beats with attention. Much like Calma’s cover skull, which recalls the extravagant decorations marking a Day of the Dead celebration, Komba bursts with evidence that Buraka spent a loooong time constructing these tunes. Like a lot of dance music, the basic patterns and textures repeat in four-bar cycles, but any random four-bar sequence contains some unexpected element—a little ripple before the beats, a simple synth hook that never reappears—that renders its song exquisite. Which is to say, I haven’t actually danced to Komba, and while I don’t discourage the practice, the music enhances other kinetic body motions as well. (I’m partial to rocking in a rocking chair.) Komba’s beats reward close listening. Buraka draw their beats from the “hard-ass” feel of the recent club craze kuduro, Angola’s answer to Brazil’s favela funk music. (Conductor, one of the group’s three founding producers, hails from the West African country.) Much of Komba sounds like music you’d hear from M.I.A., the jet-setting kuduro fan and onetime Buraka guest-vocalist. Even within that consistent style, Buraka’s beats vary from the handclap gallop of “Candonga” to a cool not-quite three-against-four stagger in “Vem Curtir”. The beats break down frequently, but they never lose momentum—some other element always swoops in to pick up the slack. The rapid-fire bubble sounds of “Tira O Pe” are especially charming....full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| African music has been so heartily embraced by today’s indie world that it’s hard to even remember the old days of scratchy field recordings, obscure French record labels, and sheets of liner notes written by Western ethnomusicologists. These days, African street musicians roll with Western indie rockers, and musicheads in the US and abroad are influenced by a whole slew of new sounds coming out of Africa. Buraka Som Sistema are a microcosm of this new system of musical dissemination. Inspired by African immigrants living in European ex-colonial countries, Portugal in this case, and supported by European labels and distribution, select African artists are now gaining exposure to audiences outside their region. This is the context through which Buraka Som Sistema come in. The group has an interesting story, fusing the little-known kuduro genre of dance music from the South-Central African nation of Angola (a former colony of Portugal) with European techno. Kuduro (meaning “hard ass”) itself comes from Angolan DJs taking on Western club sounds, so it’s not like they’re remixing traditional music here. It’s kind of like Dengue Fever’s story: a group of Western indie heads discover an obscure and intensely vibrant genre of immigrant dance music right in their own backyard and dive in head first, collaborating with artists from the culture they’ve fallen in love with. As a result, Buraka Som Sistema work well: we get music that’s familiar enough to be palatable, but strange enough to be intoxicating. On their new album, Komba, the beats are hard. Hard and deep. “Hypnotized,” despite its slightly annoying sample, has a bare-knuckle boxing feel, all adrenaline and zigzagging beats. Opener “Eskeleto” is easily the strongest on the album, thanks partially to Nigerian/British rapper Afrikan Boy. I’m reminded of the French expression “La goutte d’eau qui fait déborder le vase” (“the drop of water that breaks the vase”; the French equivalent of “the straw that breaks the camels back”), as it feels like Buraka Som Sistema have shattered the standard four-on-the-floor techno sound by introducing African rhythms, taking Euro-techno and adding just enough new sounds that the beats spin out and break into angular shapes. “Candonga” nails this style, bringing in slightly syncopated percussion to throw the techno beats off track and to move the music away from the expected. Komba is an album informed by African music, but beholden only to the dance floors that birthed the band....full text |
| Nme |
| Komba’ is an Angolan ritual, and not one you’d particularly hanker to be the subject of. You’re dead, basically, and all your friends are celebrating your life with a boogie to your favourite song. Which is nice, but you’re, y’know, still… dead. This is the subject of the second album from Portugal’s Buraka, who blend a traditional African sound, kuduro, with techno and, inevitably, dubstep. Its mix of clanking rhythms, bleeps and whistles is certainly insistent, although it’s the vocal tracks that stick: see ‘Eskeleto’, like a voodoo ceremony held at Plastic People, featuring Afrikan Boy rapping about dissecting chickens and eating pig tails. Goths, eh?...full text |
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