Janka Nabay

Bubu King

(True Panther)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Janka Nabay became a beloved figure in his native Sierra Leone by adapting the traditional, tribal, seldom-heard style of music called bubu for a modern audience, adding electric guitars and fast-paced, dancehall-oriented flourishes.  Civil war drove him from his homeland and into the arms of the far-off City of Brotherly Love; his Bubu King EP gives him an opportunity to reach an American audience that – this reviewer included – will be largely unfamiliar with both the tradition and Nabay’s unique interpretation.

Being released on the Matador imprint True Panther will give Bubu King a chance to flicker onto an indie radar that it otherwise may have missed, and a four-song EP is a great way to introduce something new without reaching the saturation point.  A portion of the EP was recorded in Freetown prior to Nabay’s exodus to America, but the four songs fit together seamlessly.  “Top Sul Bah” gets the bubu party going with its joyful vocal interplay between Nabay and his female backing vocalists, frantically propulsive instrumentation and a relentlessly repetitive rhythmic core that dangerously flirts with sounding like the bubbling din of slot machines on a Vegas casino floor but steps back from the precipice just in time (and is otherwise obscured anyway by the front-and-center vocals).

John Kennedy and America make appearances in “Eh Congo,” which slowly expands from “Top Sul Bah,” riding a similar rhythm while shifting into a somewhat more serious tone, despite the infectious “hip hip hip hooray!” stretch at the end.   At that point, it seems like Bubu King may largely be relegated to a single trick, albeit an enjoyable one.  But the closing two tracks move in significantly different directions.  “Good Governance” is more melodically helter-skelter, and carries an overt sociopolitical message as Nabay sounds the call for women’s rights and multi-party democracy.  Then the EP wraps up sublimely with “De Bul,” in which Nabay further stretches the boundaries of bubu, bringing in an electric guitar sound that will immediately be familiar to fans of the growing number of American indie bands that have lovingly nipped from Afro-pop in the past several years.