Property

“Property” is the first thing you hear on Pure Confusion, King Ayisoba’s seventh album, and it sets the terms for the record: a Ghanaian songwriter on the kologo, a homemade two-string lute made from a calabash and goatskin, singing about a problem he describes in the plainest possible terms. “Land is a problem for everyone,” he says of the song. “If you don’t build on your land they will take it away. Plenty corruption in Ghana, plenty confusion. They sell the land to two, three, four people and then everybody fights.” It is a protest song delivered as practical advice, which is the most convincing kind.

What surrounds him is the strange part. The album was cut live in a single afternoon at Adrian Sherwood’s studio in Ramsgate in late 2024, with Ayisoba’s kologo performance captured first and the rest built around it. On “Property,” the credits list Ivan Hussey on bass, Matthew Smyth on drum programming, Alex White of Fat White Family on saxophone, and Alan Glenn, formerly of the Yardbirds, on harmonica, with Ayuune Sule on percussion and backing vocals – a lineup that reads like a pub quiz answer for a Ghanaian roots record. The Quietus, in its September 15 review of the album, put the dynamic well: Ayisoba “plays the kologo as rhythm and melody at once, hard and unbroken, and Sherwood’s guests have to find room around him rather than the other way round.”

That review also flags the album’s main weakness, and it applies here as much as anywhere: some of the overdubs “edge toward” the “exotic additions” his longtime collaborator Arnold de Boer once said the aim was to avoid, and the saxophone in particular “occasionally sounds like it wandered in from a different session.” As an opener it asks for a little forgiveness on that front. But the anchor is never in doubt – at 5:19 the song is a kologo-and-voice performance first and a production second, and Sherwood’s dub instincts, as the same review notes, suit an instrument built on repetition.

7.8/10 – a blunt, urgent opener that lets a homemade instrument and a plainspoken grievance lead, even when the guests occasionally crowd the room.

Hero image: “Pure Confusion” album cover art, Mais Um. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.