Review Summary: All C-beams glittering and tears in rain, The Comet is Coming’s latest is a mood drenched blast of retro-future aesthetic and irresistible rhythm
If you’re aware of Sons of Kemet, King Shabaka’s other main musical project, you know how deeply plunged in the depths of rhythm his interpretation of jazz is likely to be. Your Queen Is A Reptile built its entire body around that rhythmic core, polyrhythmic percussion pounding out Fela’s irresistible demand from across the ages to get up and
move!, the other members of the ensemble backing that rhythm, blaring that groove, united one and all in a conspiracy to induce movement. On Hyperdimensional Expansion, King and company continue to the same destination, along a different path. Shedding the skin of afrobeat, King, along with keyboard/synth player Danalogue and percussionist Betamax, adopts the straightforward, hypnotic groove of the modern dancefloor, leaning so heavily into that relentless, throbbing club dynamic that the fusion between jazz and EDM becomes seamlessly melded into a night and rhythm-addled whirl of latticed synth waves and pulsing sax that is just as likely to be blaring stretches of single eighth notes behind the rhythm as it is to be blowing sultry, spaced-out melodies. While the focus throughout the album shifts continuously between those two poles of jazz and electronica, the unitive mood is consistently lush, spacey, sensual, the soundtrack to a neon-lit, rain-drenched club from out of a Blade Runner movie.
Opener and lead single Code pulls out all the stops on the club influence, to the point that it’s safe to say that it is in fact an EDM track, with the barest hint of jazz influence coming from King’s saxophone which acts primarily as a rhythm instrument taking a role more typically filled by a synthesizer, a bare, melodic pulse punctuating and heightening the dance-inducing effects of the beat. Angel of Darkness takes all the spacey energy into an unexpectedly menacing turn, an oppressive layering of looming clouds of synth and piercing sax, a welcome change of pace that keeps the proceedings from becoming too monochromatic in mood. Technicolor’s hazy, disoriented bob-and-weave carries on the space-drunk, intoxicating mood with woozy synthesizers and stumbling grooves while elsewhere the album dives into the retro-futurist aesthetic with pumping analog synth arpeggios and new-age shakuhachi. Atomic Wave Dance and Mystic recall the hyped-up energy of Sons of Kemet at their most urgent, the former in particular a frantic foot-chase soundtrack through some Kowloon Walled City of the future, adrenaline-drenched and frenzied.
While The Comet is Coming is more of a collaborative effort than some of the other project’s King Shabaka has taken part in, his pulsing saxophone still ends up being the most significant feature throughout, the voice and defining element of the whole project, if only by virtue of being the most consistently present. This isn’t to sell the contributions of the other members short, but it’s hard to imagine The Comet Is Coming without that smooth, spacey wail, or that pulsating, rhythmic, astonishingly controlled groove. The whole thing is ultimately Danalogue’s show though, the array of various atmospheres conjured by his keyboard wizardry dizzying in their variety and damn near virtuosic in their execution. Betamax’s drumming is a more than complimentary backing to the other members, and while he gets a good enough chance to shine on the more frenetic numbers, his contribution tends, by necessity, to be more workmanlike.
The trajectory of The Comet is Coming seems to be ever upward and outward from their synth-heavy, space-jazz aesthetic, but in an ordered, almost algorithmic progression along the paths they set for themselves at the outset. Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam isn’t making any wild, exploratory forays into new ground, but rather taking the elements from previous work and pushing them harder than they’ve gone before. The trio’s cinematic appeal has only been augmented by the new focus on pulsating, anxious club rhythm and the occasional retread into safer, more standard lounge-ish territory is forgivable as long as it remains true to its mind-altering atmosphere. But for the most part, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam finds itself filling a niche most of us weren't even aware was there, and doing so with an almost visceral appeal.
