MUSIC REVIEW: Heroes Are Gang Leaders’ Live Performance @ Sons D’hiver Festival In Paris

“Never defined, HAGL displays a joyful bazaar of heterodox energies, made up entertaining and glitter cabaret decorum but also, and the link of all of this is definitively there, voices. Shouting, free speech, talk over, spoken word and even sprechgesang where the vowel knows how sensual nonchalance have to sound.

Add to the 4 voices Jenna Camille’s one, with her magnificent off-centre chant in LeautoRoiography, and you’ll have a collective musical invention celebrating black culture in the Baraka way. Street preachers against boogiemen.

Battlefield against love full ascent, tortuous imprecations against furious beauty. Let’s find here the elegiac care of Lewis blowin’ who urges him, when out of the flame, to drill the moment with velvet hymns (in Amira). Let’s know the art of counterpoint of Heru Shabaka-Ra. Let’s smoothly swing on the laidback but precise break beat struck by the rhythmic Crudup / Stewart.  All of this working on sound dyed in the mass. Ready for the riot.”

Photograph by Frances Charteris