Albino de Congo

This turns out to be the kind of album that repays repeated listening - I found it a bit serious and subdued when I first heard it but over time I have found different moods and unusual combinations of black metal with other styles of music including slower, almost country / western-styled music on a couple of tracks, some jazz here and there, a bit of industrial ("Mushole"), something sounding rather like field recordings of night insects ("Kurlerha Omugongo") and elements of central African music including chanting ("Isirhe"), African rhythmic drumming and instruments like thumb piano. Plus the Lugubrum sense of humour is still there, only more subtle!

The first few tracks emphasise the black metal more with some non-BM touches like clean guitar melodies, sharp drumming and a clear production that gives the music a clean spacious atmosphere. With "Mushole", things start to get interesting: you have a lovely liquid acoustic guitar melody, very nice and relaxing, with an outdoorsy campfire kind of ambience in the background followed by a rhythmic tribal sequence that sounds at once industrial, bombastic and even a little Gothic. To top this off the track ends with some lethargic parping sax (if you sneeze, you may miss the coda). After a return to BM on "Buikalabalume", the band strikes out again on "Kurlerha Omugongo": this time we go on a laidback, spacey blues-tinged rock trip that eventually rubs up against some doomy BM and then onto a long meandering journey where the BM-rock fusion blends into the open outdoors with perhaps electronic chirping-insect effects and a woozy half-drunk spoken monologue. A near-industrial rhythm makes the track a bit creepy and I'm reminded of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" which of course happens to be set in nineteenth-century Belgian Congo (now the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo).

Final track "Isirhe" ties up a lot of what's been before: BM mixed with lighter and cleaner rock that fall into loops of African chanting, a light pounding rhythm and another faster percussive rhythm which has a light woody sound.

I haven't heard very much of Lugubrum before - I did have their album "Heilige Dwazen" a couple of years ago - so "Albino de Congo" did come as a surprise though perhaps there's more continuity between the two recordings than I realise: certainly the cover for "Albino de Congo" features repeated images of an insect that looks suspiciously like a fly or some other critter that lays its eggs in dung, a reference to one of Lugubrum's favoured themes. The music seems tighter than what I recall though it still slouches a lot. Altogether it's an enjoyable, even relaxing recording though I admit I'd prefer the African influences to have been more upfront and louder. I'm hoping one day my dream of Lugubrum and Congolese band Konono No 1 with their electrified thumb pianos and loudspeakers performing together will come true.

Given that Lugubrum are from Belgium and apparently went to the DRC to record this album with the Congolese influences, it's tempting to speculate on the band's reasons for going there - there may be some cultural / political dimensions to the decision to record "Albino de Congo". For those of you who need a quick history lesson to understand the context behind "Albino de Congo", the DRC was a former Belgian colony, originally the personal property of King Leopold II who was forced to hand it over to the Belgian government when news of the brutal treatment of the Congolese people caused an international outcry (we're talking about people in the nineteenth century, mind). The Belgians continued to rule the Congolese brutally with forced labour, no democratic institutions and restrictions on the people that amounted to an informal apartheid. (Thanks, Wikipedia!) A lot of the problems the DRC experiences today can be blamed partly on this history as well as on the leaders the country has had and on the exploitation of its minerals by Chinese and Western mining companies.