Exuma II

by

Exuma

I listened to this album as part of the Musicbrainz Album Club

This was a completely new artist to me, from the album cover and release date I was expecting some kind of psychedelic rock, but this is more psychotic! The instrumentation is very sparse, percussion and acoustic guitar, so the main focus is the vocals. The vocalist has a great, raw and rough voice, he really pushes it into a bellow or growl and that's when it sounds best. I'm going to hazard a guess and say that this was marketed as some kind of "voodoo rock" at the time, several tracks certainly have a ritual feel, with the relentless percussion and chanting. The best of these is Paul Simon Nontooth which is almost like a mini play detailing the resurrection of a corpse (not the diminutive folk-rock singer). The other songs are much more "normal" (well, not actually normal, still completely deranged) and have lyrics dealing with social injustice etc, give a listen to "Fire in the Hole" which contains my favourite lyric from the entire album "You can't have a lot of people living high on the hog and have another people living like dirty dogs"

This kind of reminds me of Comus in places (the ritualesque bits) so that's no bad thing. Apparently he did some reggae material as well, I'll be checking that out.