White Power Outage Vol 2

The revolution will not be televised, nor will it be terribly organised if the Free Radicals are in charge. Active since the mid-90s, these lot cover the gamut of Black diasporic music: dub, Afrobeat, jazz, ska, hip-hop, cumbia, all made possible with their funky low-end and ever-present brass section; their ethos off the bat has been concerned with borderless thinking, decolonisation and, above everything else, equality for all.

This album follows an earlier volume instigated by Donald Trump’s presidential reign and parallel fervour for ‘white power,’ with the group enlisting a multilingual posse of Houston rappers, singers and poets, even a local councillor and comedy improv group, to speak truth to power. The results are uneven; there are fully-furnished songs like the anti-Cuban embargo anthem ‘El Ritmo Contra Gitmo’ with its anxious beat, and the claustrophobic hip-hop of ‘Pokke Koebês’ featuring Afrikaans rapper Jitsvinger, and some great instrumentals – the Afrobeat ‘Frozen Power Outage’ and cumbia ‘Manifestación en el Centro Hoy’ being particular highlights – but so many of the 25 tracks are mere sketches, with the resultant album feeling like a charged snapshot of Houston life, of its frustrations, hopes and diversity, but lacking a coherency to amplify that message outside of the city.