The Great Bailout - Moor Mother: Review
Review By Lav:
Moor Mother is a Philly-based poet and versatile jazz musician who has spent more than a decade pushing the boundaries of both her songwriting and the often increasingly abstract and experimental sonic palettes she lends it to. I've enjoyed the past two Moor Mother albums quite a bit in particular her 2022 effort JAZZ CODES. But The Great Bailout might surpass that in terms of both conceptual ambition and sheer intensity.
I would consider this record more sonically experimental than its predecessor, but not because it has more going on. In fact, the album sort of kills with quiet sometimes. Guilty is a riveting start to the record where Moor Mother teams up with Lonnie Holly who contributes surprisingly eerie vocals to this chillingly minimal instrumental space. I love the fluttering strings that exist in the sucking isolation and how challenging they come off despite how sweet they sound.The repetition of the phrase "did you pay off the trauma" sets up so much of what the album tackles thematically is just makes for a delightful opening moment.
Even when the album does up its volume it doesn't come with an increase in density. Compensated Emancipation has this eerie buzzing of what i think it saxophone that combines with this warbling backing vocal and occasional grinding noise. It sounds so genuinely oppressive and intense despite not actually being that loud. Of course, Moor Mother's spearing of centuries of classism and racism overtop of it certainly hammer things home. Death By Longitude takes aim at Eurocentrism with another absolutely pummeling vocal performance. It's sort of the one exception to the album's sonic palette serving up one of the strangest and most disorienting instrumentals I've ever heard on a Moor Mother album. It features these garbled vocals and sounds warped around each other and stretched to their absolute breaking point, the kind of thing you've gotta hear for yourself.
Speaking of things you should hear for yourself, I can try my best to do the storytelling of this album justice but there's really nothing like hearing the full thing. All The Money features repetition of the phrase "where do they get the money" in between date and time-specific references to stolen art and artifacts from around the world. It's a song whose storytelling absolutely commands your attention from start to finish. Similarly, Liverpool Wins continues to lambast Europe honing in on the way the continent bailed out the rich rather than providing reparations following the abolition of slavery. There's an incredible and from what I can tell historically validatable story of a museum exhibition opening in the middle of the song that serves as the standout moment on the album for me.
I don't think the album is perfect necessarily. South Sea is a 9-minute defacto closing track that goes all over the place. It has moments I like a lot like early on when it deploys vocals as an element of sonic storytelling mimicking nature sounds. It sounds like something Matana Roberts would do and really heightens the song early on. But I can't say I like may of the remaining passages or the way it shifts between them quite as much.
Save for a few moments on individual songs that don't hit me with nearly the same intensity, I think this album is excellent. Moor Mother manages to reach her peak of both sonic intensity within the key moments of these abstract compositions and unwavering lethal poeticism in her all-out assaults on worthy targets. The album is huge but focused and overwhelming yet intricate. It took me more than two months to fully assemble my thoughts on the record, but it's just one of those that is worthy of such deep consideration. If you want a record to knock you down while being so interesting you can't help but get right up, this is a can't miss. 8/10
For more experimental music, check out my review of Kim Gordon's The Collective
