BCUC - The Healing review | Robin Denselow's world music album of the month

The Guardian 80

(Buda Musique)
Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness’s choppy, chanting vocals, backed by insistent, inventive bass-playing, really shake up South African music

Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness, better known as BCUC, continue to shock and surprise. A seven-piece band from Soweto, they have shaken up the South African music scene by mixing the ancient and modern with a real sense of danger, matching bass and percussion against furious, chanting Zulu vocals. There were echoes of American gospel on their last album, Emakhosini, but BCUC are not edging towards the mainstream. The new album is titled The Healing “because we are descended from tribes who use music as therapy”, and it has the wild but trancelike quality of those north African musical healers, the gnawa or the Master Musicians of Joujouka. Instead of conventional song structures, there are waves of sound that ebb and flow like a storm, with violent passages dominated by the angry, declamatory vocals of Zithulele Nkosi suddenly giving way to the soothing, soulful voice of Kgomotso Mokone, the one female member of the band. There are only three tracks, one of them 18 minutes long, and they include two inventive collaborations.

It’s all held together by bass player Mosebetsi Nzimande, whose insistent, inventive playing provides the framework for this constantly changing set to succeed. The first track, The Journey With Mr Van Der Merwe, about exploitation, starts with a sturdy solo bass riff, before building into a workout that includes rap and call-and-response vocals. On Sikhulekile, Femi Kuti joins in, playing free-form jazz saxophone. And the finale, Isivunguvungu, features the American poet and rapper Saul Williams on a track about “cleansing bad souls”. Exhilarating.