Do Me Bad Things were the Next Big Thing for a brief moment back in the mid-noughties. Ten years on, vocalist Chantal Brown is back with something altogether more terrifying.
Now going by the name Oya and accompanied by fellow practitioners Ogoun (drums) and Marassa (guitar), she fronts a devilishly heavy Afro-psyche trio on a mission to celebrate West African voodoo and its worldwide spread.
Topics covered include the Franco-Dahomean Wars (Mino’s Army), the desire for supreme transcendence (Loa’s Kingdom) and the Catholic Church’s campaigns against superstition in Haiti (Kanpay Rejeté).
If that all sounds a bit impenetrable, fear not, for Possession is filled with the kind of thumping riffs that don’t require an academic background to appreciate. It’s wrapped up with spoken-word interludes, rattling tribal percussion and monstrous levels of all-round freakery, as Oya’s Motown wail soars above the madness. Gloriously weird.
