Jake Blount’s second album under his own name, following 2020’s Spider Tales, is a work of radical Afrofuturism, but more Dark Mountain apocalypse prepping than Black Panther. “My vision of civilisation’s course does not involve glittering ships hurtling through the cosmos,” he writes. “Such idealised depictions of the future . . . remind me only of humanity’s wasted potential.”
Following Octavia Butler and NK Jemisin, it imagines a world after catastrophic climate change. When Blount sings on “The Downward Road” about an “old grasping ruler, thought he was doin’ mighty well” who finds out he has “made a bed in hell”, it resonates with William Gibson’s Jackpot trilogy, set partly in a high-tech future where the poorer 80 per cent of the population has died out, not because it would have been impossible to save them, but because no one could be bothered. Blount’s album might be an account of what happened to some of that 80 per cent on the way out.
“When the debt to the planet came due,” says the album, some survivors follow the ruined coast of north-eastern America, attacked by bandits, subject to lynchings and disease, to arrive on an island off the coast of Maine. (The sound world is punctuated by ambient and drone sounds recorded on Cushing’s Island, just outside Portland.) The album represents a religious service they might have conducted, composed of the traditional songs of the African diaspora in the Americas, from Fannie Lou Hamer to Mahalia Jackson to Skip James and Blind Willie McTell, and reaching back to a constant thread of the 17th-century lament “Angola”.
Blount sets them with stark, low-tech instrumentation: banjo, fiddle, handclaps — the only element from the last century is tumbling testimony from the rapper Demeanor and the occasional fuzzy guitar, like a memory of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The service is divided into three sections, introduced by a prayer, a parable and a psalm: meditating on the past, then on death, then on the promise of a future.
The historic songs fit neatly into the imagined — or predicted — apocalypse. “Didn’t It Rain”, popularised by Jackson and Tharpe, looks back to Noah’s flood but its “waters rising all night long” speak to the collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet as surely as to the New Orleans floods of 1927. The vocals swoop gloriously, Blount’s guitar and banjo bass propel the song over Brian Slattery’s percussion, and the words cast a deepening chill. “I believe that we have the ability to avert this future,” Blount avers. “I do not believe that we will make use of it.”
★★★★★
‘The New Faith’ is released by Smithsonian Folkways
