BLK JKS - ZOL! - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

It's been too long since anyone was able to bring this much soul and heartblood to Progressive Rock, a medium that has been left cold and dry by a misguided focus on technical show-offery. But by entangling the music they love township Blues, fringe Jazz and renegade dub into the DNA of prog, BLK JKS have provocatively pulled afro-futurism into a new century. AFTER ROBOTS has all the ingredients of a party record but this is not party music. It's at times disorienting and overwhelming, but it always maintaining a cool, alluring mystique.

With a wrecking crew rhythm section, debonair vocals, and guitar concoction of one part shred and two parts soul, BLK JKS shoot an African music sensibility through the tenets of rock. It's easy to politicize them. Here's a band that's instantly young, black and fly even as they reclaim styles that have been stolen, watered down, and regurgitated for generations. And yet to get caught up in anything but their sound is to sell this phenomenon short, because as musicians - as artists - BLK JKS simply cook.

SOCCER MOMMY / SOMETIMES, FOREVER - Sometimes, Forever - the immersive and compulsively replayable new Soccer Mommy full-length - cements Sophie Allison's status as one of the most gifted songwriters making rock music right now. The album finds Sophie broadening the borders of her aesthetic without abandoning the unsparing lyricism and addictive melodies that made earlier songs so easy to obsess over. To support her vision, Sophie enlisted producer Daniel Lopatin, whose recent credits include the Uncut Gems movie score and The Weeknd's Dawn FM.