BCUC: Millions of Us album review — spiritual yearning and angry denunciation

Soweto’s Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness have built a reputation as a festival band, playing long, percussive songs that switch from angry denunciation to spiritual yearning to declamatory incantation. Their initial trilogy of albums — Our Truth, Emakhosini and The Healing — capture this attack perfectly. The follow-up, Millions of Us, is a departure but only a mild one.

The artwork has moved from protest graffiti to Afrofuturist, and as the album opens it sounds as if the music has as well. The drums are roomier and more echoing, the rhythms less full-throttled. “The Woods” starts with Kgomotso Neo Mokone singing in English about trees as a metaphor for the musicians’ journey. Have BCUC turned to spiritual jazz?

Not quite. Even though this opener is a bagatelle by the band’s standards, clocking in at less than six minutes, it builds to a thumping denunciation of “the killers of the wood”, with rapping across South Africa’s major languages. “Thonga Lami” rides in on stampeding drumming and staccato whistle bleats while Mokone and Zithulele “Jovi” Zabani Nkosi trade vocal lines over a mbaqanga-influenced bassline from Mosebetsi Jan Nzimande. His bass unspools at fidgety double-speed on “Ntuthwane” — “machine gun”, someone shouts approvingly in the background. There are odder moments: “Searching” has a quieter, trance-inflected polyrhythm and an mbira-like buzz around the edges; “Pieces of Isht” is punning spoken word over funky bass and drums.

But the title track, playing out over 20 minutes, is vintage BCUC, ending in a slow vamp as Nkosi preaches about the power of fighting back with love. “Can’t stop this train. Can’t change the dream.” And the closer, “Ramaphosisa”, is a furious jeremiad against South Africa’s president, with whistles sliding sourly until the music drops away completely as Nkosi sings “Ramaphosisa o rometse maphodisa”. Ramaphosisa, you set the police on us . . . the police are killing us. Unity is strength, they insist, and strength unity. “Killer killer killer president . . . killer killer killer of the black people.”

★★★★☆

‘Millions Of Us’ is released by On The Corner