Warrior King – Blak Ah Kill Blak – Review

April 16, 2020

Warrior King: Blak Ah Kill Blak Single Review – Steve Topple for Pauzeradio.com.

Warrior King is no stranger to creating searing and powerful music that pushes narratives often avoided by other artists and media. And his latest track is no exception to this, giving a deeply raw and moving experience that sees him and the peak of his powers.

Warrior King Blak Ah Kill Blak, released via Rootz Warrior Productions and Calibud Music, is a glorious yet unsettling piece of Roots/Dub. The production is slick, emphasising the necessary instrumentation to hammer the track’s message home. And the composition itself is stellar.

The main musical devices within Blak Ah Kill Blak are heavily Roots and Dub orientated. The use of only the root chord and major seventh throughout is always pertinent when you have a track whose theme is paramount, and it works to good effect here. It allows the instrumentation to do its job: acting as leverage to King’s vocal and lyrics.

The bass is heavy, focusing on the downbeats with a five-semiquaver phrase. This is an interesting use of the line, as the focus on the first and third beats of the bar with this rapid-fire riff runs in tandem, but at odds, with the other traditional methods employed on Blak Ah Kill Blak.

Roots is represented in the use of a bubble rhythm on the keys. The guitars skank at times, but they’re also pushed into Dub territory with the heavy use of reverb and decay. This appears on the offbeat between the third and the fourth, emphasising the bubble and the skank. This clever mix of bass on the downbeats and keys/guitars on the ups adds to the brooding nature of the track.

The percussion, meanwhile, is stripped back and unfussy. It avoids a straight one drop, with the kick accenting the first and third beats of the bar with a double time smack. But the snare picks up the one drop role, hitting the upbeats. The arrangement serves to keep the track’s momentum going, but also under control. Backing vocals mix up more traditional Gospel-inspired Roots layered harmonies and African chant influences.

The engineering of all the instrumental lines has been done particularly well – allowing the bass to take the lead, as with all good Roots and Dub, and the other parts to follow. This gives King’s vocal plenty of room to breathe.

What’s also ingenious in Blak Ah Kill Blak is the unsettling juxtaposition of the major key with the stark and profound theme. It’s this element of the track which perhaps works best to emphasise King’s performance. And a sterling one it is, too.

His timbre and quality of voice have not waned over the years, and King puts it to full effect. He delivers a well enunciated, rounded vocal – authoritative and commanding, grabbing your attention from the off and never letting up. King’s technical skill is also good, covering a varied pitch range with some neat vocal runs. And there’s a clever use of syllable phrasing in his performance, too. This serves to emphasise the lyrical content. Blak Ah Kill Blak is both a sermon and a potted history lesson. King discusses why black people are fighting and killing each other in 2020, given the rich history that they have. It serves not only as a philosophical question, but a broader point about the system’s ‘divide and conquer’ technique which sadly works so well against all of us.

Blak Ah Kill Blak is a stirring, potent track from King. Expertly constructed, it’s strong yet measured, clever yet humble – and will add to this accomplished artist’s impressive body of work.