GROOVES n jamsS.O.T.Y. 2021
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You can smell the smoke hanging in the air over āĆ BerĆ©;ā itās jazzy, the kind of club vibe where everyone in attendance is seated. It takes Loshh several minutes to set the mood but the smokiness is there from the very beginning. By the time the soulful, almost restrained, guitar solo takes off, āĆ BerĆ©ā is a vibrant, verdant planet and Loshh is our spaceman. The dankness betrays the cost of this trip: his soul. Iām not sure if, ultimately, this planet is an afterlife or if it can be lived here on Earth, but in some ways, simply lighting up and listening to Loshh is transportative enough to reach a halfway between the two. Itās not a light listen, however. āĆ BerĆ©ā is punctuated throughout with mortal anguish and ends on a wailed note. Itās heavy highlife, as saturated in its bright notes as its deeper tones, shot through with enough joy that the ending is mutable. Sometimes itās a sorrowful death and others itās a joyous shout.
The downside to a long-running writing project is eventually you make a hypocrite or an idiot of yourself, and Iām sure thereās some point in the past where Iāve complained that a song was too long when it stretched past like four minutes. āĆ BerĆ©ā works because itās more than seven; letās call it growth on my part that I can recognize this now. It needs this time to stretch out, to build, to demonstrate its mutability as it improvises around the central groove: thatās what makes the climax and Loshhās anguished shriek hit so hard. His central wish for racial equality and his plea on behalf of Black women form a powerful, unresolved message, one thatās still unanswered. Lulling listeners into a trance across the length of the song means that even if weāve heard it before, it arrives here as a shock, a powerful and bracing call to action.
