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An interview on facebook chat and blackberry messenger was therefore only appropriate. Miss Khalaeilah discovered her singing talent at about the age of seven. She just sang around the house you know the usuall hairbrush….. singing along to the nursery rhymes blah blah but it wasn’t until she was about 16/17 that she decided to choose singing as her career. After attending St Francis Xavier Sixth Form College, Khalaeilah proceeded to Central School of Speech and Drama (CCSD) in London. Well it might seem like i’m blabbing on with no evidence, here goes..I’ll let you be the judge..

Musically Miss Khalaeilah is inspired by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Lucy Pearl, Mariah Carey and compares herself to India Arie and more modern Chrisette Mitchell. On playing her music to some of my friends, she has been compared to Corinne Bailey Rae, India Arie, Amel Larrieux, all wonderful soul artists. Alongside being an excellent singer, Khalaeliah writes her own songs which, as well as being very good songs are wonderful pieces of poetry.

Follow this to hear her version of Amy WInehouse- take the box

http://www.facebook.com/#/video/video.php?v=1053917222453

Music for Khalaeliah in her words is all about “producing honest music and not just for commercial’s sake.” It’s refreshing to see real music talent than the usuall naked, no singing talent and conventionally mainstream artists that the music industry is saturated with at the moment. At a young age of only 19, Khalaeliah is making herself a name, a good one at that considering she only took her singing seriously about two years ago.

I haven’t actively taken myself to a music store to buy an album in a very long while,but if Khaleilah is to drop an album I shall be doing exactly this. Her voice is just sooo soulfull and perfectly controlled. A singing voice that sounds the same regardless of wheather the song is a live or a recorded version which, is something rarely ever achieved by the modern music artist. Miss Khalaeliah has been approached for her music a couple of times. I haven’t a single criticism about Miss Khalaeliah as a person and as a music artist and these exact features destine this young, beautiful lady for ultimate greatness.

Visit her myspace http://www.myspace.com/kaleidoscopesosolo

Join her facebook group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=80187416508&ref=ts

SPREAD THE MESSAGE AND JOIN TEAM KHALAELIAH!!!

GOOD UJU DAY PEOPLE

kookysistawiththehair.

xoxo

This is a long one, so bear with me.

I sit here on a Sunday morning, having ‘woken up’ at the 8.30am mark at which it was immediately obvious when I leapt up to silence my phone alarm (which, as it turns out, is a recording of the same sort of alarm that you get when, in a secret underground lair in a film, someone presses the self-destruct button and all hell breaks loose, red lights flash,people scatter like headless chickens, you get the picture) that it was going to be a long day. I realised once I had turned it off that a similar alarm was going off inside my cranium, there may have even been a sexy female supercomputer voice calmly telling me that I had ‘T-minus 2 minutes til core meltdown’. Point is, a glass of good red early on, followed by a wifebeater, a generous measure of white, one champagne lager (I think that’s what it was), one Guinness, and one Super-Strength did not agree with me 5 measly hours of sleep later.

Luckily, as I logged into facebook to check whether anything of mediocre importance could perchance occupy a few hours of my life and give my brain the illusion that it was actually running on more than 27 brain cells, I found that ‘Dominick Myles Petterson had posted something on my Wall’. Not getting my hopes up I click on the link to my wall, which reads, ‘after robots. spotify. its GOOD!’ emphasis toward the end of the sentence was very necessary, this was reason for celebration!

Now the After Robots which Easy Cheetah was referring to was, of course (or not of course if you don’t know BLK JKS), the eagerly anticipated (proably only by Dom and me and 12 other people globally) debut album recently released by BLK JKS. By way of an overview-in-a-sentence, BLK JKS are probably the most exciting band of the times, they’re fresh, psychedelic, fingerlickingly reverberated, chorally-african drumbeat rock. And their ‘Mystery EP’ was shit hot. Recorded in Electric Lady Studios (note the massive Jimi Hendrix reference here) in New York, these guys clearly aren’t messing about, and it’s safe to say that they’re one of the few bands of late to make such a big noise without an LP.

So in order to fully appreciate the album I’m going to assume that you’ve heard the EP, this is not some kind of imperative education but it doesn’t hurt to know where these guys are coming from to see where they’re going. In fact it doesn’t hurt at all, it’s possibly the best entrée on the menu to compliment your main course, Madam.

Before I opened this can of worms, Easy Cheetah had another monkey to let out of the bottle when he said that he’d already read a review that said the album was average, determined not to let the rain ruin my white t-shirt competition I duly read it, only to discover that the underliying tone was one of frustration, or disappointment. This was good news, the album apparently was not an accurate expression of how good these guys actually are. In case you didn’t get that, and just to illustrate a point, I’m going to write that again. THE ALBUM IS NOT AN ACCURATE EXPRESSION OF HOW GOOD THESE GUYS REALLY ARE. You cats best believe that.

Having not been able to get the album without paying for it, Spotify and its Take That Singstar adverts was not going to make this a good experience, so I bought the album off  iTunes, and sat through it the way it should be enjoyed, in its all-encompassing THX-certified 5.1 surround sound glory.

Ok, enough of this fat-free cotton-wool pillow-talk, let’s get to the fudge.

‘Molalatladi’ jumps straight into the thick of things, with a pulsing rythm it is a great introduction to the album (something which I maintain as very important in an LP’s opening track). I swear theres a solo-break very similar to the one in ‘Mystery’, potentially paying homage to the title track from the old EP which did not make it to the new album. Pitchfork accuse the track of building for too long then petering out, threatening to explode into something but never doing so. But they’ve been compared with TV On The Radio whose last album (which lots of people said was very good) contained an opening title track which did exactly the same thing. It is only a taster of what’s to come, don’t spoil the party before you get there.

‘Banna Ba Modimo’ begins with a guitar riff that primes you for the all the brass, prog-rock glory to follow. It is here that the references to The Mars Volta shall start, the devilish guitar and latin horns juxtapose brilliantly with Lindani Buthlezi’s voice. I began to think that whoever is writing the music has been listening to a lot of Mars Volta lately, or not, maybe I’ve just been listening to them too much. Either way the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble plays brilliantly to make the track rise and fall like the tide and the technical climax at the end of the track seals the deal.

Now will also be a good time to start talking about the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, it’s funny how all the cool people in ‘the business’ seem to hang out or collaborate with each other, I was introduced to this group by my cousin some time ago and it pleased me very much to find out that they’d been involved with this album. Definitely a band to check out on the side, more references and ‘bigging-up’ will be made of them later.

‘Standby’ could be a Wishbone Ash jam track, the acoustic guitar recording work is spot on, and the reverberated vocals contain passion and pain. Criticisms have been made of not being able to hear much being sung, that is not the way of the BLK JKS, what you do hear come out of the fray in snippets sticks steadfast in your mind, often it is something nonchalantly philosophical such as “Hello, do you know what you’re searching for?” in this track. It hints at a potential to emerge into a massive jam, but doesn’t ever jump into it, working in and out of a climax intermittently while keeping with the initial mood of the song.

‘Lakeside’ on this album is a notably more chillaxed version than its previous incarnations, maybe because they’ve played it a lot, or because it suits the song better, though still they do bring the upbeat when it is needed in the songs signature climactic build. The bass kick signals entry into the solo, which lets loose a lot more than it used to. Here one wonders how reviews can say that they’re too controlled, they climax the shit out of the end of this song.

And jump straight into ‘Taxidermy’, (another Mars Volta heads up here with the references to death, but again maybe not) “At the top of the hill he lay barren with his insides out”, Buthlezi then sings an African word which I don’t want to attempt to spell but it will suffice to say that I know that I cannot even begin to comprehend the imagery that he lays down with that one word. Again with the general philosopical ramblings “if we all survive”, building to a climax (yes another one for those who say there’s not enough) which ends abruptly “you better dry your eyes now or otherwise”.

‘Kwa Nqingetje’ is a beautifully experimental track (more Mars Volta) with the reverse-delayed samples and a deep rolling bass. A lead guitar looms in the background as Lindani sings, fading in and out not in a threatening way. They never labour music, this dreamy song is weaved over the best part of 8 minutes and by the end I can almost hear Cicatriz Esp in there and now it’s time to lay the Mars Volta references to bed. As far as a debut album goes After Robots is no De-Loused In The Comatorium, but the people who worked on that album had already made albums as At The Drive-In, they already were a band as such. After Robots is a very respectable effort by BLK JKS who are an entirely different species of psychedelic progressive outfit.

‘Skeleton’ brings a dubby skanking bassline with dirty delayed guitar. The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble cut a tune that reminds me of Fat Freddy’s Drop when played with the keyboard jah-ing before going into a rock-y chorus. Some great lyrics in this one lead into a mean spanish break which turns into, if you haven’t already guessed, a climax jam. By now I realise that every song has the potential to ignite an explosion in a way that only can be described as ’scary good’.

‘Cursor’ is a return to the slow bassy song style with a wild lead guitar and reverberated Buthelezi vocals. Reverb in this case is a GOOD thing, you concentrate less on the lyrics (which are actually beautiful once you decipher them) and more on the intonation. Let’s not forget either that The Strokes’ debut album was pretty much Julian Casablancas singing through a megaphone and cool kids still sang to that.

A xylophone or something of the sort then penetrates the silence before a strangely mainstream acoustic chord progression starts on rythm guitar, lowered expectations of the track are then blown away by the fatherly African (I have no idea of the specific language used) lullaby that ensues, you think you can pick out words but its safer to let the voice take over as the guitar becomes secondary, you could totally sway to this for hours, or just the entire duration of the song.

Then comes ‘Ghost’, scary from the outset, reverberated drums and a simple but imposing two chord mood. I’m reminded a little by this of Led Zeppelin’s ‘When The Levee Breaks’, but darker. The intertwining English and African narratives keep you on edge and feeling sinister, though I didn’t stop enjoying it for one moment. A mini-climax leads to a animalistic dub breakdown which takes you out of the album. Dancing to this, I imagine, would be quite primally satisfying.

Basically, the reason why I have spent so many sentences defending these guys is that as I have said before, they’re ‘Scary Good’. The reviews which I have read seem to echo this sentiment, while being perhaps a little more critical, saying they just need to let loose a bit more, which is encouraging. One factor which always should be taken into account more than it already is can be summed up in one word, Africa. Or more correctly, South Africa. It runs thick through their music and for this reason cannot be compared to closely to contemporary musical structure or direction. Even I am not in a position to fully understand how well these guys lay it down because I’m missing that very piece of the puzzle. Then again did anyone ever change music by conforming to norms? I think not.

As we all get more musically aware we’re able to comprehend more complex amalgamations of sounds, genres and instruments. This is demonstrated intricately in ‘It’s In Everything You See’, another brilliant Mystery EP track that didn’t make it to album. It’s reassuring that both Pitchfork and Line Of Best Fit think that they can do better, Pitchfork even appreciating that they need time to refine, and to be given a bigger budget. I for one am very excited and what would emerge if you gave these guys that kind of freedom to produce something spectacular.

It’s very tempting to jump the gun and go straight to anticipating a second album. But for now, why don’t you just appreciate some of the chaos After Robots brings?

Brother Bear Love

P.S. It get’s better, watched the video in the side bar, tuned to me by Easy Cheetah. These guys literally can’t sit still! They’re so switched on they’re going crazy, and it’s great.

I know what I used to do to avoid that nonsense – I used to climb a couple trees, take a wonder around the house…The trick was to keep moving. But one thing I was always safe doing was sitting in the living room by the hi-fi, sometimes going through the piles of CDs made by funny looking people with names too strange to care about as a kid, listening to the music.

I do wish I remembered what thoughts were like at that age, and if the music stimulated some brainwave or if it just warmly filled my head, but this is one of the things I do remember; Franco & TPOK Jazz. A bigtime figure when it comes to African music this remarkable group, headed by the “sorcerer of the guitar” Franco Luambo, were innovators of a delicious sound called “Congolese rumba.” They have followed me through from those young years – and I’ve only just figured it out. Franco & TPOK Jazz, Tout Puissant Orchestre Kinshasa – the “all powerful Kinshasa orchestra,” kinda resonates with the history of its birthplace, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and i’ll tell you, that sound goes down like granadilla Yogi Sip. There is a great sense of deep culture, but its got a big smile and it wants you to try a rumba. It’s a feeling I would love to be able to describe, but thanks to our world wide web I can just let you feel.

Here’s some of my favourites for your ears

Mario – Their big hit, the original song is a near 20 tasty minutes

I recently found out that Franco & TPOK Jazz were also favourites of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of what was then (1965-1997) Zaire, who was in some way their patron – I’ll venture safely in saying Mobutu was not someone you wanted to make an enemy of. Some sort of wonderful irony is at play, the two sides of the coin that make much of Africa the place I love.

Big Love,

Easy Cheetah

I’m immediately going to start by saying that this is not something that I found myself, it came to me, like much of the good media that I cherish, from a friend. So  if this strikes a chord within the fibre of your being and you can relate to it, credit Dominic Tang.

I couldn’t be too bothered to find out who the interviewer is as I sit here pretending to do work, but she asks some very thought-provoking unconventional questions, to which Thom Yorke responds very happily and openly (something he very much avoids and despises when doing conventional ‘industry’ interviews). Immediately it is obvious that this is not just a Radiohead semi-promotional-interview-on-foreign-television. The interviewer, who I now know to be one Charlotte Roche, shows that mixing it up culturally is what it’s all about. Being born in England then living in the Netherlands before moving to Germany, she spent her ‘formative years’ leaving home, starting a band, self-harming, experimenting with drugs and shaving her head and seems to have emerged on the other side as a complete, confident and aware person. She’s worked on television (which is why she’s doing the interview), been in a film, and written a semi-autobiographical bestseller with massively blatant pornographic imagery. So she’s a pretty rad chick we’ve established. The angle which she takes in the way that she frames questions in fact surprises Yorke, and she is pretty happy-go-lucky considering the subject material covered. It strikes me as strange that a lot of the things that he says are things that I can completely understand, not being concepts too deep for ‘your average joe’ to understand but more because they embody what has been a recurring theme of recent times for myself and the other ‘dislocated, disillusioned’ nearly-twenty teens that I live with. Obviously I’m not as outspoken as Thom but he does well to iterate the thoughts that permeate some of my day to day consciousness.

One can’t help but feel a little special to be in the same boat as the Radiohead frontman philosophically (ignoring blatantly that the interview was from a good couple of years ago), either that or everyone feels this way and we’re all too afraid to connect with each other over it because of the very fact that we feel a bit more special being dislocated and unique than as part of the herd.

I forgot to mention that you should try to ignore the fact that I turn into a big wet girl at any mention of Radiohead and seeing them live in the summer simply dug up the cardboard box at the back of my mind where all these subconscious Yorke thoughts got shelved and lay dormant for a bit.

So in summary, why, after all the awareness that we credit the human race (or most of it) with, have things not changed? Perhaps it’s because everyone just wants to be cool enough to walk around at a music festival and interview someone famous and, as Thom put it himself, maybe the political concern stage only lasts for about 10 minutes every day, and the rest of the time we can walk around in blissful ignorance.

Brother Bear Love