BLK JKS – After Robots

While the full-length debut from South African band BLK JKS is one of the highly anticipated albums of the fall for all your favorite indie magazines, a lot of people don’t realize is that this foursome has been around for a while. They’re not an accident.

After the popularity of bands like Animal Collective or Vampire Weekend, whose sounds thrive on Afro-beat elements, it’s interesting to hear a band who’s working from the reverse – an African band taking their penchant for percussion, jamming, and mixing in elements associated with American indie and shoegaze music. Indie label Secretly Canadian has finally brought the band to American audiences, both with their EP earlier this year and this full-length, After Robots, album due out in September. This band also come highly recommended from dub DJ and producer, Diplo, as well as Secret Machines frontman, Brandon Curtis.

What makes the record strong is BLK JKS penchant for variety. They know how to write concise songs, but they also aren’t afraid to let people marinate in their instrumentation. Clocking in just under eight minutes, “Kwa Nqingetje” starts off like a more solid, straight-forward track, and then wanders off in a way that encourages listeners to follow. It’s a risky move. Sometimes letting attentions drift means never getting the focus back, but then the band introduce new textures in the subsequent song – synthesizer and brass, to be specific – and re-engage ears simply by throwing a curveball.

BLK JKS first started playing together as childhood friends. In that time, they’ve had the opportunity to consume and riff on many styles of music as well as learn to trust each other. The proof is a song like “Tselane,” the album’s closer, which almost feels more like spoken word or a simple chant rather than a full song, but they make a transition from harder rock patterns to pared-down crooning seem effortless instead of dangerous or too scatterbrained an album to ready pack any punch. Here, it works really well, the band putting your ear through a ringer of grooves that bounce every which way, and then sending audiences off with a lullaby.

BLK JKS’s music is infectious. Many rock-oriented studio albums don’t also manage to capture the feel of a live session, but After Robots does. It has levels, a wide variety of sonic textures, and manages to sound big without feeling overproduced. Vocalist Lindani Buthelezi doesn’t have an extraordinary range, but his timbre and dedication to making something work in a song is just as valuable. BLKS JKS just know how to make an album that feels good. If there’s one bandwagon to jump on this year, this is the one.

Related posts:

1. BLK JKS- Molalatladi
2. BLK JKS- Lakeside

Tagged as: Johannesburg, South Africa

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