Album Reviews // Seba Kaapstad - Thina

17^th May 2019, Mello Music Group

The cover art of Seba Kaapstad’s second LP Thina exemplifies the collage context of the band themselves – an international neo-soul outfit primarily rocking the cradles of Africa and Germany but now bursting onto the growing stage of our shrinking world. The geometric jazz shapes and electronic wavelengths are soothed into place by the ancient beauty in the vocals, creating a turning spirograph of influences that flash and dance like moiré patterns around the band’s vital energy. Glorious sunlight strobing through old trees as you fly by in a locomotive train.

The title track Thina tessellates clicking polyrhythms over descending, blue-tinged piano runs like an LA Beat Scene number, recalling wunderkinds Georgia Anne Muldrow and Jameszoo on release date mate Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label. Zoe Modiga’s fluid transition from Zulu to English and back is restorative in its seamless ease and ably manages to communicate on both fronts even to a pitiful monoglot such as I.

Whereas on Africa the more jarring call and response of Soulquarian hip hop with Latin and African jazz elements is an intentional metaphor picked up in the album’s first rapped verses. Languages change mid-bar and speak of complexity, conflicts and resisting uniformity – they push an agenda of fragmentation as a means of disrupting oppressive structures and redefining oneness to be attainable for everyone. You can feel in the refrain the bands’ love for the continent that brought them together and bore their early forays into music, as well as their insistence on Africa’s recognition as “the help that built this architecture” – here in terms of music and throughout as the foundations of human history.

The power of a eyes-closed, head-back, banging refrain is felt all over: on RFRE as a mantra of worship to the nomadic spirit that delivered us this group and as a hymn to “bliss in the way we relate” on the closer Bye. On both it’s their absolute immersion in harmony and collaboration that draws the listener in like a hook in the cheek, humming gleefully as they’re dragged on board.

These maximal panegyrics on togetherness are artfully balanced with interludes like Love! and the electronically manipulated piano stomp of Billionaire. Love! functions as a jazzy palette cleanser before the sweet last quarter and Billionaire as buffer for the more broadly synthesised tones of Don’t which pipe in house-y, sequenced vocal samples and mellow rolling bass womps.

As the band’s reach opens up to access these digital jazz soundscapes the organic elements step up their beatific rejoicing in reponse – drop dead gorgeous piano melodies and crystalline harmonies from Modiga and N’Dumiso Manana are rounded out by live drums and strings. The hybrid cyborg soul carries through to Heckman where the voices take on a pulsing drone between Sebastian Schuster’s piano and Philip Scheibel’s increasingly eccentric explorations.

Unfortunately, leaning into the kind of contemporary pop-jazz of artists like Frank Ocean and Steve Lacy is a slight dip on an album of this global energy and purpose, despite the performances and production maintaining their flawless sheen. The sentiments expressed on Playground and Dezaster are fine and admirable, but they’re not expressed in a new or newly emotive way as with the first half of the record. They don’t hold the spark of any new perspective. Much needed in a 24 hour world where joy grows dull as soon as it’s out of the plastic packing – even this kind of bright call for tolerance and positivity.

Welcome ends with the band freely riffing over splashy percussion and a more copacetic and wonky set of repeating melodies, relighting the fire of inspiration and bursting into Breathe and Love!. These songs show off a more academic and afro-futuristic jazz lexicon and imbue it with a hue of invention and liberated expression, especially on the colourful criss-crossing vocal lines and harmonies of Breathe – before the album is rounded out by the dawn and dusk choruses of RFRE and Bye.

Their Mello Music debut is a road map that fires off in myriad directions over contours of peaks and dips – occasionally stumbling, sometimes striding, often soaring – but always pressing onward. They may lack the tireless, burning energy of contemporaries like Ibibio Sound Machine, Ezra Collective or Sons of Kemet; all of whom brandish togetherness and free expression like a singing blade forged in urban furnaces. What this group has though is an infectious chemistry that can’t be put down to the violent crush of London or New York – it blooms from individuals in open spaces who strive to find each other across sonic and cultural divides. It’s a timely and beautiful album about reaching out to a new global continent of the mind as much as accepting in the repressed continents of old.