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Album Review: Build
an Ark - Peace With Every Step (Kindred Spirits / P-Vine)
Writer: Scott Wright
If ever a band should be at Glastonbury it’s
Build An Ark. They’re the musical equivalent of wearing flowers
in your hair. They’re wooden beads and sandals; face-paint
and peace signs; the sound of a thousand tie-dye dashikis flapping
gently in the midsummer breeze.
Like Sun Ra’s big band mother ship, theirs is an Ark made
of sound. But whereas Ra aimed for the stars, Carlos Nino (until
now best know as half of both Ammoncontact and Nu Vibrational) and
his 20-strong crew have plotted a different course. This vessel
isn’t bound for the interstellar highways: as Nino says, "we
came together to make music that hopes to inspire peace and love
in this world".
You can’t fault their ambition. Nor, for the most part, can
you fault this album. Peace With Every Step - with its handclaps,
flutes and chanted invocations of peace and freedom - is sunny,
spiritual, and giddy with optimism. It’s also the kind of album
that suggests breathtaking live performances.
As befitting such a project, the band members are an impressively
multiracial, multigenerational bunch. Led by Nino and the Leon Thomas
sounding Dwight Trible, their membership includes Tribe Records
founder Phil Ranelin, the Pan Afrikan People Arkestra’s Nate
Morgan, and cofounder of the Pharaohs, Derf Reklaw.
With so much talent on board, Nino wisely lets them get on with
it. His clever production, spare and spontaneous, gives the album
a timeless ‘recorded live’ feel. No Matthew Herbert
like playfulness here; Peace With Every Step could have been made
thirty years ago for Bob Theile’s Flying Dutchman Records.
The material reflects that. A freewheeling cover of You’ve
Gotta Have Freedom sets the tone, quickly followed by a blistering
version of Ranelin’s own Vibes From The Tribe. The
loose-fingered keys, the clip-clopping percussion, the cries, the
shouts: Build An Ark sound like old friends jamming on a sunny LA
afternoon. And never more so than on the sweetly strummed Pure
Imagination - a charming cover of the Willy Wonka song that,
halfway through, segues joyously into Tortoise and the Hare.
It’s pure, unadulterated twee, but so infectious you just
can’t help but get carried away.
That’s not to say they’re frivolous. Drawing from the
likes of the Arkestra, Peace With Every Step is infused with an
earnest spirituality. There’s a gorgeous version of Stanley
Cowell’s Equipoise, and Incognito’s Always
There becomes a languid eulogy to masters past.
As you’ll have noticed there are a lot of covers, and that’s
where the album falls down just a little. Build An Ark’s own
"collectively composed" pieces are unfocused and lack the majesty
found in standouts like Michael White’s Blessing Song.
And at 18 tracks it’s just a little too long.
The more cynical among you may also find the relentless optimism
a little wearing. Love Is Our Nationality's simplistic
assertions to “dismount your tomahawk” and “put
down your gun and pick up your baby” are sweet, but belong
to different, less politically complex times.
Yet to gripe about the sanguine mood is to miss the point; such
joyfully optimistic records are rare these days, Build An Ark’s
clear-eyed naivety and unrelenting positivism are a big part of
their charm. Peace With Every Step is, musically and politically,
exactly the kind of record these guys were making in the early seventies:
a glorious, unpretentious brew of jazz, soul, and African rhythms.
It’s not going to save the world, but on a sunny day in Somerset
I doubt anything would sound more perfect.
RELATED LINKS:
Buy Build an Ark's Peace With Every Step album at Amazon
UK (CD / Vinyl), US (CD)
PUBLISHED: 9 July 2004
RELEASE DATE: 28 June 2004 (UK), 24 May 2004 (US)
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