Toronto-based, but soulfully Trinidadian, Kobo Town make sharp, cerebral calypso music. After 2013’s Sound Complexity Played on the Jukeboxtheir 2017 sequel Where the Galleon sank it was relatively straightforward, a reflection of their live sound. Both albums constituted a form of Caribbean psychogeography, teasing out connections between past and present, far and wide. Frontman Drew Gonsalves recorded his anxious reactions when visiting London for the first time, given its place in the Caribbean imagination, and has provided reportage from the riots in Karachi – all to rocking beats and sly rhymes.
Carnival of Ghosts it is rooted in a more general existential crisis. In the album liner notes, Gonsalves describes taking the subway to a recording session in Paris a few years ago and watching an elderly violinist lead a virtuoso performance to make up for the indifference from commuters. He wondered, was the fiddler a ghost from the past, or was the audience all “shadows lurking in the pale self-absorbed Hades of our creation” and he the only living man? The album starts down these rabbit holes, taking a tonal cue from Played on the Jukebox“Tick Tock Goes the Clock,” a five-minute distillation of Milton and Land of waste.
“Shades of the Living” begins in that underground carriage, in “the glow of incandescent blue light,” and throws in references to Donne, Eliot, and Plato. Then the narrator falls asleep, like a Port-of-Spain Piers Pluman, and dreams a vision of the dead, from Shah Jahan to Herod to Julius Caesar to “Genghis Khan and Casanova/arguing who was the greatest conqueror.” .
The Grass is Greener begins with two men each lusting after the other’s wife, like any old carnival staple, before segueing into a deeper catalog of regret and remorse. The album continues to consider fate (“The Hidden Hand”), memory (“Under the Water”), the moral underpinnings and contradictions of natural selection (“Here by Chance”), and subverts culture (“One by One,” which evokes a hanging in the town square.)
The centerpiece of the album is “Time”, its passage personified as insatiable instability, “stealing all the sand from the hourglass”, grinding lives into dust, devouring everything in sight. “You pull the tree from the seed/Then you suck the green from the leaf.” Horn wheel and swing; Robert Milicevic’s drums move inexorably. It all ends with the Ozymandian “Along the Road,” the monuments of humanity shining in the sun that is warming the sediments that cover them.
★★★★☆
“Carnival of the Ghosts” is released by Stonetree
