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The Sway Machinery
The House Of Friendly Ghosts, Vol. 1
| The musical story of Jeremiah Lockwood is almost hard to believe. It reads as though someone stuck a bunch of National Geographic articles in a blender and hit puree. His early musical development was guided by his grandfather, a Jewish cantor, and Carolina Slim, a well-known blues guitarist. That's an interesting mix right there, but he's since established himself as a member of Balkan Beat Box, a collision of hip-hop, electronic music, and Balkan brass music, and during a trip to Mali to play the Festival of the Desert, his blues-based guitar playing seems to have absorbed the sound of the host of Tuareg bands that have recently come to prominence.
All of these influences crystallize into something unified on Lockwood's second album as the ringleader of the Sway Machinery, the Brooklyn collective he's built to execute his ideas. The collective includes players from Antibalas and Arcade Fire, Tom Waits collaborator Colin Stetson, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs drummer Brian Chase, and for The House Of Friendly Ghosts, Vol. 1, they're paired with Malian singer Khaira Arby, who they met during their trip to her country. Arby is one of Mali's most widely respected female singers and has a powerful style influenced by both southern Malian traditions and Arabic melisma.
She fits in easily with the Sway Machinery's funky rhythms, crunchy guitar, and horns that borrow from Afrobeat, American funk, and even a bit of jazz. Her two biggest showcases are among the album's best songs. "Gawad Teriamou" is a stomping Afrofunk/desert guitar hybrid with dubbed out horns that she absolutely owns-- her singing has the effect of sparks flying off something extremely hot. She's arguably even better on "Hey Ha Youba", a heavy song that hinges on the way Stetson's bass saxophone intertwines with stabbing horns, Lockwood's dry guitar, and a monolithic Zeppelin drum beat. Arby struts through the middle of it-- it's hard to imagine how a singer could do anything else with this backing.
On other songs, Lockwood sings lead, and he has a diverse style that's heavily informed by cantorial singing, a melismatic style not terribly far removed from the Arabic approach that influenced Arby. On album closer "Shalom Aleichem", he sings in Hebrew, but he uses the style while singing in English on other songs, which can be a little jarring-- the singing style was designed around religious songs sung in Hebrew, a language that's spoken very differently from English, and the type of phrasing it requires doesn't always wrap quite right around English words. Lockwood doesn't overplay it, though, and the tangled rhythms the band puts together give it a context in which even the more awkward phrasing is carried swiftly along.
The album is structured as a sort of combination song collection and travelogue-- nearly half of the album's 15 tracks are quick interstitials, snippets of women or children singing and camels braying that give the songs a sense of origin in the desert world where the project was first conceived. The House of Friendly Ghosts is never short of interesting, and in its best moments is galvanizing.
