HONOUR – lf (with Alternative Cover Artwork) – LP – Black Vinyl

LP – Indies Exclusive Limited Edition Black Vinyl with Alternative Cover Artwork.

Honours debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, lf is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the unexpected poetic profundity of casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, or personal archives. The result is an impressionistic vision in Black and Blur that both exhausts and implicates languagesubstantiating a mythos proposed by Fred Moten that sublimates boundaries between everywhere and nowhere; history and the present; the individual and the universal.

lf delineates a gothic landscape cut by overdriven beats, swooping orchestral blasts, choral bursts and ear- splitting fuzz, where the fleshly and spiritual realms commune. Dedicated to Honour’s late grandmother, the title track began to take form after their last embrace and remains steeped in her influence and spirita tape-saturated composition that starts in Lagos and ends in London’s smoke-stained cityscape, the songs dream-like quality developed out of the artists grief and PTSD coping with this loss. Beneath the stretched guitar drones and stuttering loops, their grandmother’s shared faith bubbles to the surface.

When Angels Speak of Love, borrows its title from two works by Sun Ra and bell hooks, respectively. Sculpting echoes of praise music into disorienting spirals perforated with syrupy DJ Screw-inspired breaks and sharp splinters of melancholic guitar, When Angels Speak of Love engages a conceptual dialogue with the spirits of both late thinkers, folding them into Honours pantheon of ancestral guides. The albums ninth track, Giz Aard ($uckets), is a dirge of regimented drums which anchor this somber melody as it whirls into a blizzard of heartache, uncertain if its consequence will be death or eternal joy.

The albums sole lyrical offering, Pistol Poem (Lead Belly), begins with a darkly humorous bar, He went thru hell and back/ came back/ 2 get the strap, that swells into a haunting allegory based on the life of Philip Hot Sauce Champion. A modern take on the Blues, Honours lyrics reify the artists status as a student of both literature and popular culture, crossbreeding the artists clever wordplay with additional references to Richard Pryor, Robert Johnson, Kelly Rowland & Bryon Gysin.

Setting core principles of hip-hop, R&B, jazz and gospel music to atemporal soundscapes and compositions, Honour crafts a record that marinates in its own knotty contradictions. The ghosts that sit on the artists shoulders have never been more tangible than with this emotive debut.

Tracklist:

SIDE A
01. Hosanna (Meridian)
02. First Born (Redeemed)
03. When Angels Speak of Love
04. doubleUpptown (LaRocque)
05. W-I-S (Above Every Other)
06. Pistol Poem (Leadbelly)
07. Whip Appeal (PIPN8EZ)
08. Seven Trumpets
09. Gizaard ($uckets)
10. Helpmeet (Iyadunni)

SIDE B
11. Flir2a
12. U&Me (decemberseventeen)
13. ILLBETHERE, 4EVERANDEVER
14. lfa (Citas World)