BLK JKS - TT the Bear’s (Cambridge, MA; Oct. 7, 2009)

God knows how long BLK JKS has been on tour. The band played three shows at SXSW six months ago and have since been on the road with barely a week straight at home. Yet somehow, BLK JKS found time to record and release their excellent debut album, After Robots. The ceaseless touring shows in their set, for better and worse. Their performance at TT the Bear’s was fantastic: if there is a band playing more synergistically, syncretically and synaesthetically, I haven’t seen it. On the other hand, the show seemed beset by technical problems and flaring tensions between band members. But then again, you can never be sure with the JKS—apparent obstacles are often, deliberately or not, simply a sly means of slipping in the point of the groove they will wield with the heft and bite of a machete a couple of bars later.

Thus, the precise beginning of a BLK JKS show is imperceptible despite the ensuing sturm und drang. The musicians pace the stage, strumming and stuttering, intently inspecting their sound for flaws, while the PA plays whatever. Then gradually a dim shape emerges from the haze: a strummed pattern on the bass or a muted strum on the rhythm guitar. Subliminally and unnoticed, a groove takes shape. Unnoticed, that is, until drummer Tshepang Ramoba gets started.

The BLK JKS are all superlative musicians about whom one could write many paragraphs; in the interests of space, I will let Ramoba stand for the whole. Ramoba is the engine of the band. A friend who has accompanied me to multiple BLK JKS gigs advises novices to keep their eyes on Ramoba to keep their bearings. He plays like a many-armed Hindu god, a dreadlocked Medusa whose snakes play cymbals. He makes one wonder what other drummers do with all the time on their hands.

The JKS are sparing with melody, conserving their attentions for the rhythmic demands of their songs, which are not so much polyrhythms as extrapolations of the nodding, loping compound time that is the most overtly South African component of their music. They remind me of Sigur Rós in their irredentist vision of a sound at once global and indissolubly national (and their disregard for the pronunciation struggles of Western fans). Just don’t call it “world music.”

The band’s performances of the After Robots songs confirmed that the JKS recorded output, while admirable, is merely a sketch, a storyboard for their performances, which take the constituent parts —melody, rhythmic structure—and treat them with the same deference and disregard as “My Favorite Things” gets in a jazz bar. “Lakeside,” the sole holdover from the earlier Mystery EP, has been buffed up, the better to allow the ecstatic break after “Where did it all go long?” to shine. Lindani Buthelezi’s singing is more often bolstered by the rest of the band, turning scant melodies into militant chants that soon drown in the rising instrumental tide.

The biggest surprise on After Robots is the “Skeleton”-“Tselane” passage which both closes the album and was the set’s finale. “Skeleton’s” lyrics are more specific and personal than earlier work, which sacrificed significance for resonance, while shedding none of Buthelezi’s customary dire portent: “If there’s a skeleton in your closet that looks like me / Through the leaks in your floorboard you couldn’t see / You’re on your own / And I’m right between the sheets.”

“Tselane,” meanwhile, reveals a more slender, even gentle sound, a soundtrack to Ramoba’s spoken musings on fame, Facebook, and MySpace. On record the song is wan and wistful, but at TT’s Buthelezi teased out an Icaran melody on the guitar while leading the band in a somber, potent refrain in counterpoint. It was as complex as the BLK JKS’s scorched earth numbers, but all the more effective for its subtle restraint. 

The official setlist ended there, but the crowd at TT’s remained rooted in place, so the band plunged into “Summertime,” an older number that pays respects to its illustrious namesake without being in any way confined by it. After a blazing finale, the JKS left the stage, pursued by several important-looking gents in expensive jeans. But again, the crowd was not done with them.

They returned to play “Mzabalazo,” which guitarist Mpumi Mcata introduced as a song from the South African struggle, their take on a song “by the people, for the people.” The last time I saw BLK JKS play at SXSW—the third time in three days—I tried to bribe them with a Zimababwean $50,000 note to play it, and Mcata looked sceptical. “We only play that one when the circumstances require.” What can we do, I asked? “We know it when we see it.” That time, the band blew out the venue’s power system halfway through their set, sending us on our way with an unamplified drum solo. On Sunday, TT’s power held up while the band burned through a call to revolution that they had made entirely their own. 

DOWNLOAD: BLK JKS - Molalatladi (MP3) or Follow us for more BLK JKS MP3s (Twitter)

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