Who Is This America?
As a hard-hitting Afro-beat orchestra that embellishes vintage Fela-style grooves with touches of gritty funk and fiery salsa, Antibalas quickly won over a sizable local audience in New York City with its sweaty live shows and relentlessly danceable rhythms. But while the band's past two efforts sounded fresh amidst a landscape of retro-rock cool, the discs never measured up to the band's galvanizing live show:Liberation Afrobeat Vol. 1was a piecemeal effort of live and studio material;Talkatifwas woefully short. Now onWho Is This America, the band constructs a great-sounding 70-minute studio effort where the seven songs are skillfully woven together, not because they all sound like one long Afro-beat song, but because there is imaginative arrangements and tasty musicianship. Here multiple percussion players are the launch pad and the funky horn charts ignite liftoff whether it's the tightly wound "Indictment" or the slowly building "Sister." Undoubtedly the band's finest work to date.--Tad Hendrickson