BENJAMIN BOOKER - Lower

Benjamin Booker had vanished from the radar after his second album, “Witness”, released in 2017, had exposed him to the global alternative audience and earned him countless festival appearances worldwide, helped along by champions like Jack White and Courtney Barnett. We'd almost forgotten about his alternative rock steeped in blues and soul influences, true to his African-American roots. And yet here he is, back with a “Lower” in which his incredible mix of Black and white inspirations, always in service of political reflections that never feel obvious, dons a high-definition sound (in some ways close to that of Yves Tumor, though the two started from opposite poles) and gives us some of the best compositions of the thirty-five-year-old Virginian's career.

The blues chords echoing at the start of “Black Opps” soon meet trip-hop beats and get lost among winding guitar feedback. Booker's soulful whisper thus slips into a cybernetic rock scenario that astonishes with its cohesion and detail. The guitars of “LWA In The Trailer Park” are even sharper, and the trails they leave behind wink at shoegaze, as does the sticky tuturuttuttuttu that dances amid the ticking electronics.

We're in a cyberpunk tunnel radiating soul warmth, where Booker can stick in both a country-derived guitar (“Pompeii Statues”) and queer whispers in your ear (the extremely slow “Slow Dance In A Gay Bar”).

In “Speaking With The Death” the production and the electronic work stretch and distort the scenarios built up to that point, giving the sense that it's time to play one's trump cards.

Rebecca Latimer Felton, America's first female senator and a staunch supporter of slavery, thus takes a big Black cock (“Rebecca Latimore Felton Takes A BBC”) amid strokes of Radiohead-esque guitars (in the vein of “Exit Music For A Film”) and screeching strings. The atmosphere grows ever hotter as the senator touches herself while watching a statuesque Black slave from the patio.

It's then impossible to resist the dragging chorus of “Same Kind Of Lonely”, practically a shoegaze transfigured into “the matrix” and close to the psychedelic visions of the latest Lil Yachty; while the folk lullaby “Heavy On My Mind” wins you over with its whispered, sincere sweetness.

The contribution of a super-producer steeped in hip-hop yet attuned to modernity, like Kenny Segal, was certainly crucial in developing Benjamin Booker's new sonic world. But without a top-tier interpretive refinement and his writing skills, at times provocative and offbeat, Booker could never have made a third album as convincing as “Lower”.

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31/01/2025