Umkhondo ka Sabelo Soko - Album Review

In The Furnace Of Dreams.

And so goes a Zulu idiom, which encapsulates the temperment of this poetry recording by one of South Africa's young and incisive voices of ungovernable conscience.
Sabelo Soko, an enigmatic wordsmith immersed in Zulu heritage, has fashioned quite an outlandish deployment of old-fashioned idiomatic expressions with his first studio album - Umkhodo Ka Sabelo Soko.

And as the South African poetry scene continues to suffer from a surfeit of homogenous Afrocentricism and banal chantery of jukebox national pride, this anthology has set him on a path of linguistic innovations that borders on invocations of the ancestral. His poetry's unconventional use of isiZulu and the radical conceptions stemming from his imagery seem brewed from a burning quest for reclamation of secret spaces, where poems become privy conversations, incantations of coded omens unto the unborn and faceless living.

It is often the cynical task of poets to forge fantastic masks from the debris of the past trauma, and bring them on the stage of the violent present with a sobering clarity of unheeded prophets. And here, we are experiencing a birth of such a critical voice, politically fractured, yes, but inking words that are daggers. Umkhondo is a lyrical testament that those daring enough to remodel archaic language devices, transcending the palatably floral yet flawed, can speak to souls of those who've had red-hot coals mark
their chests.

But what will the mainstream do with a spoken artist with such a subversive political edge? Certainly not adorn him with inflatable credentials distributed by cartels of the literary orthodox theatres.

I listen to Do Away, an eerie interlude that is both a cautionary anecdote and a continual interrogation of norms and trends deluding thousands of weary youths. Khuzani is yet another blend of the oral tradition of Zulu performance art, known for its reflexivity and deadpan truth.

With dextrous economy of lyrics on Amalunde, Sabelo and Meropa Soul distill the ugly and profane in our daily life into a lucid brew that is rare at our trend-driven times of creative bankrupcy.

Is it laudatory poetry or fleeting tributes to past griots and new-age warriors? Those ever lingering moans and suffocated vocal accompaninents are on another tip. Take for an example Ezikho Lamaphupho, at times the overlaid chorus resembles tedium, a hauntingly repetitive rhythm at moments of the poet's fragility channeling grave-digger dreams. Zithande, serenaded by some lost guitar strings strummed for love's ode and vices, is yet another tete-a-tete with a youth disillusioned by high-octane love.

"This recording is no artsy dinner atmosphere music for the cultured to ponder over utopian ideas about black expression. It is fluid orature in a time of frozen memory, providing a linguistic grid for the infallible truths evading many.

Sabelo's process of retrieving such fossilized memory is an art he must have perfected with time, and his maturity is overwhelming when it comes to his mnemonic prowess when reciting. He can speak in such a multidimensional colloquialism which strangely elicits raw emotions of familiarity to the concepts he words.

His voice is a fine-tuned device that awakens each syllable, each intonation, each texture of a tattered mind displayed with unflinching potency, giving this anthology a poignant lucidity that is rare and refreshing."

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The album is available on itunes 

https://itunes.apple.com/za/album/umkhondo/1231218119 and all major online stores.