Animals

Google Kassa Overall and the brief description of him that comes up is ‘drummer’. However, like other ‘drummers’ including Moses Boyd and Terri Lyne Carrington, that one-word description doesn’t come close to explaining the range of talents they have at their disposal. Not that we are knocking drummers, heaven forfend, but there is so much more to what Overall does than that simple label conveys.

For starters he is also a singer, emcee, songwriter, bandleader, and producer – each of which on their own is more than most of us can claim. What he also does incredibly skillfully is elegantly blend Jazz and Hip-Hop in his own unique way. This is something that caused him issues when studying at the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. While the staff there appreciated his Jazz drumming, they were less enamoured with his passion for Hip-Hop. Perhaps not unconnected is the fact that while studying, Overall experienced some manic episodes, which we only mention here because his lyrics often discuss the mental health struggles of a black man living in America.

Overall is an incredible collaborator, having worked with numerous New York Jazz luminaries, and Yoko Ono, but it’s his sensational solo work that has really grabbed our attention. He started off with the wonderfully titled Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz, before releasing 2020’s I THINK I’M GOOD, on Giles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings. This second offering proved that he was in fact as good as the title suggests, and received the critical acclaim if not the sales it deserved.

And now to Animals, his third solo album, and one that marks his debut for Warp Records – a badge of honour in and of itself, with stablemates including Aphex Twin, Brian Eno and Flying Lotus pointing to the level of creative chops this man has at his disposal.

Animals once again sees Overall engage with themes of race and mental illness, and he pushes his subversive vision further with an all-star roster of collaborators including Danny Brown, Wiki, Lil B, Shabazz Palaces,  Laura Mvula, trumpet master Theo Croker, and Nick Hakim, whose understanded vocal performance on Make My Way Back Home is one of the highlights of this exceptional album.

The result of Overall’s style and this gallery of contributors is a hectic, thoroughly enjoyable 35 minutes of musical exploration. From the moment the needle drops, Overall pushes the boundaries of Hip-Hop and Jazz closer together, and on more than one occasion merges the styles so completely as to create a completely new genre of music.

But throughout all this experimentation, his acute sense of rhythm, dynamics and the subtleties of percussion prove him to be a master of the art. That’s true of both the hectic, amusingly voiced Ready to Ball and the slow, unrelenting beat of Clock Ticking, which boasts a Hip-Hop feel that most closely resembles the LA scene of the early 90s – Ice T would happily rap over this instead of Danny Brown and Wiki who take up the mic.

Other highlights including the beautiful So Happy, with Laura Mvula delivering a show-stopping vocal performance and Maybe We Can Stay, which is a pretty crazy four-minutes of electronica and wild guitar before the rather wonderful J Hoard makes his own.

And finally you get the double whammy of The Score Was Made (which again puts me in mind of the backing tracks of East Coast Hip hop from the early 90s) and the six blissful minutes of calm in the form of Going Up, which rounds off a quite sensational album.

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