I LOVE the new Benga record! I especially love Benga’s particular twist on dubstep and the acid house influences that weave throughout this album. Listening to Diary of an Afro Warrior, I feel transported to a renegade soundsystem party, under the stars, listening to Benga create synasthaethetic stories on the fly!

Background Info

Diary of an Afro Warrior has been the most anticipated electronic music album in the UK, US and Australia this year. Suspense has been building since last Fall when Tempa first released Benga + Coki’s “Night” as a single with plans to release the full-length LP shortly thereafter. Excitement flared when the album’s release date was changed from Fall 2007 to March 2008. Meanwhile, “Night” became the biggest dance tune of 2007 in the UK (and probably the most successful and widely recognized dubstep tune to date). Benga further teased fans with exclusive sets on RinseFM and a mix for Mary Anne Hobbs’ radio show that featured dubplates of the unreleased tunes. Songs previously unavailable were enthusiastically uploaded, downloaded, podcasted, and rebroadcast worldwide. Luckily, those were just a few of the 14 tracks on Diary of an Afro Warrior and the best was yet to come!

Put The Needle On The Record

The album opens with super smooth melodies and chill tempos. “Zero M2″ eases the listener into the story as gently as sliding into a warm bath. The light jazz melodies dance playfully with dubbed out drums while sultry bass lines sink deep into weary muscles. The effervescence of “Night” follows with the sonic equivalent of bubbling jets in the bath. Choruses of different instruments take turns telling a story interspersed with long, dramatic pauses. The melodies haunt the listener during these stretches of near silence, swirling and echoing in the mind; drawing the conscious deeper and deeper into the sub conscious. Submerged into the world of an Afro Warrior. “Night” has a way of lingering and “B4 The Dual” glides in like waves stretching onto a beach. “B4 The Dual” swells into a Kenny G homage that gets crunked until it resembles an old school grime riddim, only to run out of breath. It’s a weird one on its own, but it might be dangerous with the right MC. I bet it would sound dope with Chipmunk or Nolay spittin along!

“E Trips” (Track 4) is a great name for the song that sounds like the drugs just kicked in… At this point, the album turns on party mode. Things get darker, weirder and the subsonics sometimes blur the line between hearing and feeling. “Someone 20″ is an electro-house track experiencing acid-techno for the first time. Imagine KITT from Knightrider (yes, the car) at its first outdoor rave: red scanner lights bouncing energetically to the beats, computer system searching the stars above for any distant relatives: KARR, Goliath, Soundwave, Nightscream… Or, imagine a mash-up of the Knightrider theme song and the Dr. Who theme song (Orbital remix) and you’d almost be hearing “Someone 20″.

“Light Bulb” and “Crunked Up” are smooth psychedelic journeys of acid-techno and dubtronica. Those distant relatives that Kitt was scanning for in “Someone 20″ make a grand entrance on “Go Tell Them,” a track dominated by robot voices from outer space. Industrial beats suggest a robot take-over complete with hair-metal guitar outro, only more King Crimson-inspired.

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“The Cut” and “Emotions” trance out for a few minutes, providing a perfect soundtrack for star gazing into deep space. “The Cut” invokes a slightly darker sound with creeping drum-n-bass synths. The melodies sometimes get excited, but never out of control. A slow and steady rhythm keeps everything in step. “Emotions” has a touch of Dirty South drum sounds and the energy is slow and conservative like sweltering summer days. Strange coming from a northerner like Benga! “3 Minutes” is very ambient. It seems to tip toe past as if it doesn’t want any attention. “Pleasure” draws on the spaced out acid-electro of “Someone 20″ but adds occasional vocal clips on top. “26 Basslines” was clearly made to be a club banger. It doesn’t just wobble out of giant sub-woofers, it KRUMPS out! The tempo picks up slightly on this one, but the use of dramatic pauses reins everything back in again. The music gets progressively more mellow from this point out; we are gently returned to our former reality with the smooth sounds of jazz; like coming home on Sunday afternoon after a weekend of hard raving and daydreaming until fading into sleep.

Looking Back

The music morphs one reality into another then stretches beyond that to yet another. When the end of the story is near, it loops around and meets the beginning. The jazz organ in the last song, sounds very similar to the organ in the first song, as if continuing where the first story left off and transitioning back into the reality we began with.

(I originally wrote this review for MOG.com, but the version I offer you here is edited especially for HearingTest readers…)

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