Album Review: Mudbrown by Kumail
Kumail’s second album is the rare record in Voodoo’s long shadow that shows up with the homework done. Love songs mean the offer; refusal songs mean the door.
Twenty-six years after D’Angelo’s Voodoo came out, producers are still citing it, and most of those citations have been name-checks that never showed their work. An inheritance of that kind (and this is the part producers keep skipping) doesn’t travel on a press release. It travels on tape, in a room where a group of players has been running down one groove long enough to know where the silences go, and through an artist who already did the reading before anybody called him an heir. Kumail Hamid, a producer who ran a restaurant in Kinshasa for five years before he put a band together in Lisbon, names the reference himself on the lyric sheet for his second album, Mudbrown.
Kumail doesn’t get the first word on his own album. “Vultures” opens with Nickson Dufula, a Kinshasa singer working in Lingala and French:
“Esika n’a ngai y’a mbotama, eza esika oyo n’a botama té/Mais, eza esika oyo esala ngai [...] L’endroit qui m’a brisé nde esika oyo ngai nà salama.”
Dufula is discussing about the city that made him, even though he was not born in it; the lines also name it as the city that broke him and then healed him. Kinshasa is where the material speaks from in its first minute, and Kumail has moved aside to let a Kinshasa singer do that speaking.
Then Kumail starts singing about women in the vocabulary of 1970s soul, without any apology for having borrowed it. “Lady” has her glowing like the sun and like the fires in their guns, standing out from every other woman on the street he is watching her cross, and the closing minute belongs to Kumail saying “you’re my lady” to her face until he has nothing more to add. “Darlin’” is the piece where he asks if he can call her his darlin’ and wake up with her in the morning, and the bridge has him taking off her clothes and making love to her until her heart gives out. “Get Down” is set in bed. Kumail is the one asking her where she wants to be touched.
Right next to those sit the closed-fist songs. “Off My Back” runs sixty-two seconds of get the fuck off my back/get the fuck out my way, with no bridge and no second verse. Kumail flips the title of “True To You” into a charge against its addressee. If she were actually true to herself, he tells her, she wouldn’t love him the way she does, and she wouldn’t bring him home with her. Fly Anakin takes the long verse on “Tear It Off,” which is the most rap-cadenced minute on the record:
“I’m tryna see what’s underneath and up against
All this personality leaking soon as the sex commenced/what you drinking, me on the rocks that’s what you thinking
I can see it in yo eyes you can’t cover that when linking
See you peaking out yo soul curtains baby playing defense
As long as you ain’t empty underneath, I’m decent.”
Kumail’s hook argues that sex is where a person can’t fake who they are, and Anakin answers from the other side of the same question. But Anakin doesn’t sand his cadence down to fit the players. His band moves a step toward him instead.
He uses so long as you’re true to your feelings for two opposite jobs, and on “True to You” he turns it on the addressee as a charge, since she keeps arriving at his door after he has said goodbye “about a hundred times.” He throws it at an audience on “Bring It Back” as a blessing, and that is not a small thing to pull off twice without either version sounding borrowed from the other.
And so the D’Angelo comparison is worth what a review is willing to do with it. We’ve heard Voodoo enough times to know when a producer has actually done the reading and when he’s looking at the cover art, and Kumail is doing the first one. Voodoo was a full-length about letting rhythm wander off the grid; Kumail plays none of the instruments D’Angelo played on it, yet he has taken from the record a patience with his own material, a willingness to hold “Money” on the bridge phrase “let yourself go” long enough for the phrase to stop being a suggestion and become the only place the verses were ever pointing. The sample-sourcing habit that showed up on his 2019 debut Yasmin, via that Pierre Akendengue clearance on “Obota,” the 1976 Afro-jazz piece he knew where to find, has grown into something closer to composition. He built his band in Lisbon and put that same opening voice, Nickson Dufula, at the door.
Mudbrown is named after a river in a city Kumail left, but its songs are mostly about women and whether Kumail wants them near him. The one song actually set in Kinshasa belongs to somebody who still lives there. Everywhere else on the record, Kumail has been far from too many places, and what he is asking for on the songs he writes for himself is to be let close to one person at a time.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Vultures,” “Tear It Off,” “Darlin’”