Afrocop has been delighting Seattle with their idiosyncratically spacey, dubby, experimental grooves for several years now, but this is their first time gracing a volume of Ball of Wax, and I couldn’t be more delighted to have them aboard. I don’t know to what extent their usual material is improvised vs. pre-arranged/composed, but “MOAB Shield” is an impressive bit of improvisation from the keys/guitars/drums trio. (They actually call it an “improvised cluster,” but I only know what one of those words means in this context so I’ll go with that.) Rather than laying down a groove and getting crazy with it for 10-20 minutes (not that there’s anything wrong with that), they created a seemingly through-composed piece with movements, key changes, subtle and sweeping shifts in mood and rhythm, and more – like the lost Barry Adamson soundtrack to an unfinished David Lynch film. If I were better at writing about music (and had more time to do so) I could write a lengthy essay detailing the unfolding genius of this piece, but I’m not and I don’t, so I’ll have to let the music mostly speak for itself (which it does ably).
You probably won’t hear this exact piece from Afrocop at the Ball of Wax 51 release show on March 9th, but you will probably hear something at least as great.