Artist: Stevens, T.M.
Label: SPV Records
Release: 2007
A bassist who’s positively bonkers in every way, a voodoo-packaged canary named TM Stevens, whose roots go back to Jamaica, is once again blowing us away in a big way! After a six-year break, he’s back with his hard-hitting crossover band Shocka Zooloo and a new studio record, “Africans In The Snow”. The guy has a hugely respected reputation, earned through working with some of the biggest money-spinners in the music business, starting with the late James Brown and going on to Joe Cocker, Tina Turner, Cindy Lauper, Billy Joel, Little Steven, The Pretenders. Collaborations with Stevie Salas and Steve Vai are nothing new to Stevens either, nor are those with Travers and Appice, and he’s even shared the stage with the legendary Miles Davis. A guy we can, no questions asked, put right up there next to Tony Levin (King Crimson), Doug Wimbish (Living Colour) or Billy Sheehan (Devil’s Slingshot, Niacin, Steve Vai).
Thanks to its cranked-up, heavy-as-hell riffs, the album definitely has a metal tinge. The tag “funk metal”, which lumps funk and heavy metal together into one genre box, captures a big chunk of the point of this record, but “Africans In The Snow” offers much, much more than just funk metal. Of course, and I’m saying this for the most impatient, curious and distrustful among you, comparisons with Living Colour are totally on the money here, even though Africans In The Snow is a thoroughly one-of-a-kind record.
What we’ve got here is a 14-track album, packed to the brim with pretty much the best you can expect from this artist. It’s a hard-hitting patchwork that’s easiest to label as a singular “crossover” album, where the rhythm section is firmly subordinated to the pulsing funk moment, hugged by a metal-wound riff guitar, and where the variety of motifs leaves tons of room for a genuine brush with Afro ethno soul, reggae and blues. The track Fight, Fight, Fight, for example, stands out here, with an especially bold and successful combination of fused soul, blues, funk and metal. TM Stevens absolutely rules on vocals, proving once again that he took a lot of this craft from his lessons with James Brown (Stevens played on Brown’s album “Gravity”). His voice is raspy, incredibly explosive and piercing. The verses often come at you like furious commands, backed by raw backing vocals that, all together, often sound like street gangs chanting. There’s no shortage of authentic wisecracking in the verses. The vocals in the choruses carry most of their melody with an interesting mix of soul touches and African ethno chants, and there are even scraps of Mississippi Delta blues in there, measured out in trace amounts. TM Stevens’s voice is the metal funk version of James Brown. Imagine James Brown singing in an irritated funk metal variation with Living Colour. TM Stevens’s singing is outstanding. It surges dynamically the whole way through and wins you over with how deeply he lives every verse.
TM Stevens is once again impeccable in executing the bass lines. All 14 tracks follow a rhythmic and motivic tightness, steered by the winning formula of creating one all-encompassing “groove” for the record. These guys have “beat” in their blood! This “beat drive” lets you put on your headphones and instantly check out, thanks to the magic of rhythmic perfection and the communication between the instruments, which sends an incredibly fluid, piercing flux of energy through the running time, one that effortlessly sends shivers down your spine. The stylistic layering on “Africans In The Snow” really couldn’t be put together any better, because this is an album where everything complements and reinforces everything else, which is how the truly most important elements are spotlighted and emphasized, the ones that deliver the record’s aforementioned monstrous groove.
It’s incredible how masterfully TM and his buddies work the more demanding solo feats into the form of the songs. TM pulled it off so skillfully that the bravura soloing and all those little devilish tricks and ornaments from the bass master sit in just the right doses, in exactly the right spots in the songs, and that goes for Michael Barnes’s guitar solos too, which like to brush up stylistically against Vernon Reid (Living Colour). The witty sampling, which effectively sketches out and underlines, in combination with the other elements, the various moods that flow through the album in countless variations, via outstanding sound effects, is another ingredient without which this album simply wouldn’t be so convincing in its strengths. The guys can also conjure effective atmospheric turns through a sophistication of sound, which stands out on the pop-rock-built Tell Me The Truth, a track with real hit potential. For that sophisticated vibe, TM’s soft “gliding” over the bass parts is often all it takes, and in the fretless versions of his playing he especially knocks the listener’s socks off for good. The softly swaying beat combined with singable Afro melos sparks beautifully on Ayeahi, which could just as easily find its way onto the radio waves. The very next moment, the ground under your feet can dangerously shake through eruptions of funk boiling over. The element of experimenting and playing around with the rhythm line definitely brings the necessary dash of unpredictability to the songs.
This is an album that presents, in top-notch fashion, a perfected blend of endless listenability, grabby beats, instrumental complexity and contagiously atmospheric groove, the fruit of a hell of a studio party thrown by a bunch of outstanding instrumentalists, led of course by the bass monster, definitely one of the best bassists in the world right now, TM Stevens. An album of exceptional quality, clarity, freshness and untamed energy, the free-spirited kind of experimenting, caught in the sensible form of a compact, high-tension, motivic-rhythmic punch.This is an album that came out in 2007, when there’s little in the way of unique ideas to be found on new album releases. And “Africans In The Snow” is loaded with sparkling playfulness, the product of a childlike naivety and sincerity that TM Stevens carries deep inside, and that’s what brings a one-of-a-kind album to the market. An album like nothing before it, and an album you absolutely must have for that reason alone!
Lineup
TM Stevens – vocals, bass guitar, keyboards
MFA Kera – vocals
C-Nice – vocals
TC Tolliver – vocals
Michael Barnes – guitar
Neil Zaza – guitar
Andrè Meyer – guitar, bass guitar
Dominic Durham – keyboards
Garry Sullivan – drums
Hani Alì – vocals, percussion
Carlos Izaguirre – percussion
Akinola Famson – percussion
Will Calhoun – drums, percussion
Production
TM Stevens
Tracklist
1. What (03:17)
2. Up (04:44)
3. Fight Fight Fight (04:45)
4. Gotta Get My Move On (03:44)
5. Afro Soul (03:42)
6. Tell Me The Truth (05:36)
7. Wake Up (05:04)
8. Why We Rock So Hard (It’s Our Roots) (05:54)
9. Mama Said (04:35)
10. We Will Never Do That Again (05:12)
11. Weird G ( 05:07)
12. Africans In The Snow (06:49)
13. Ayeahi (04:57)
14. Why We Rock So Hard (Raga Muffin Rootdown Remix) (04:11)
Album length: 66:52
