List of Demands
is
Damon Locks
' first widely distributed solo album. It follows the self-released 3D Sonic Adventure, a vinyl-only statement pressed in an edition of 250 copies in 2024. Whereas most listeners are likely to take it as the follow-up to
New Future City Radio
,
Locks
' 2023 collaboration with
Rob Mazurek
is the result of specific circumstances -- and like everything the artist has done since the mid-'90s, it can be sensed that it was made by the same person who fronted post-hardcore outliers
Trenchmouth
. An outgrowth of a project commissioned for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in
' home base of Chicago,
unifies spoken word with sound collage. It wouldn't be out of place in a stack of records that includes work by
Nikki Giovanni
Amiri Baraka
, and
Linton Kwesi Johnson
, or landmark hip-hop recordings spanning the '80s to the 2020s.
is a calm, observant, and empowering dub poet of sorts on all but two interludes and a piece featuring the image-rich words of poet
Krista Franklin
. Sampled voices swirl throughout the mix.
Kathleen Cleaver
and
Angela Davis
are heard on central track "Isn't It Beautiful," which begins musically like an early-'70s news bulletin before giving way to
Ralph Darden
's splashing drums and
Macie Stewart
's alerting violin, then to looped drums that evoke
Wild Style
, then back to
Darden
Stewart
.
Cleaver
's "Isn't it beautiful? All right!," regarding Black hair (and Blackness by extension), is at the fore at points, sometimes overlapping with
Davis
' remarks on the state of the Black Power movement.
' voice is in tune with all of it, describing artwork like a genial teacher or docent, and repeatedly echoing
. The title song places the listener in a protest march with insistent drums setting the pace, a group of girls chanting "Look out the way when you see me coming," and crowd noise throughout.
closes it by noting the demands: "beauty, form, destiny, love, time, future, and light," strongly emphasizing the last one. In "Distance,"
reasons that "the distance between you and I is a fiction" before railing against housing discrimination and other racist cruelties that sow division. There's also a tortured scream and desperate plea of "I never did nothin' to you in my life!," a moment made all the more harrowing by violin that sounds as if it's delivering high-voltage shocks. After an apocalyptic soul-jazz dispatch from
, the program ends with what's essentially an instrumental version of the opening "Reversed," albeit it with different voices and a subtle motivational message.
is both archival and of the present -- engrossing and energizing, to be blasted from every boombox. ~ Andy Kellman