AKALA | LIVE REVIEW
The Full Moon, Cardiff, Thurs 5 Dec
The Moon is full. By which I mean the club, based on Womanby Street in Cardiff. We are gathered to see Akala, and it is packed. The rapper and poet has brought us out in droves, and the atmosphere is highly charged, with an electricity that is as much from excitement as it is from body heat.
Before the MOBO award-winner, however, a handful of local acts take to the stage. First up are Dirtywordsmith and Dickdastardly, aka The Hellionz. The former wears a ‘parental advisory’ t-shirt. And, yes, there is a fair amount of swearing. However, it is done with style, wit, punchiness, and panache. The crowd join in with tracks, the banter in between is feisty as well as friendly, and the two warm us up in the best possible way – by raising both our heartbeats and our expectations. First class future stars, these are. Brilliant!
Following these are JuggaNote, the ‘alternative hip hop collective’ – excellent – and Skunkadelic with Oort Kuiper – fantastic again. The bar well and truly raised, then, we await Akala’s entrance.
Sometimes compared to Gil Scott-Heron and Saul Williams, Akala is more political still: his last album was called Doublethink, after the Orwellian term. His outlook tends more towards the satirical – see new track Thieves’ Banquet in which Akala voices, in first person, the world’s four worst types of thief, namely dictators, kings, priests, and bankers – and is open to a wider range of influences, his debut album owing debts to Radiohead and Depeche Mode as much as it does Public Enemy and Wu-Tang Clan).
It is the artist’s mix of anger and empathy that I find most appealing, however. ‘Akala’ comes from the Buddhist term meaning ‘immoveable’. The outrage comes from a strong sense of injustice, as evinced on tracks such as Malcolm Said It and Pissed Off. His performance itself is pitch perfect – high energy, infused with morality but never preaching, engaging in the extreme, with dashes of humour in his interaction with the crowd. People pogo as if it’s the Sex Pistols all over again. And, there is the same raw lyricism, but moderated by far slicker production values.
Catchy, but still politically powerful, this is musical polemic that can only polarise, open eyes, and expand the minds of those who hear it. A truly amazing artist, Akala is one to catch live as soon as you humanly can.
words MAB JONES photo KEVIN PICK