Show review: Jamaican Queens at The Empty Bottle, 3/23

By Gene Wagendorf III

Jamaican Queens

My first run-in with Jamaican Queens was last July at The Empty Bottle, when the band were in town opening up for Janka Nabay. As much as I was excited to see the Sierra Leonean "King of Bubu," the lasting memory of that night was this odd-ball trio from Detroit. The group seemed like more of an idea than a finished product at that show, but the foundation for something captivating was more than present. A little less than a year later Jamaican Queens have released their debut record, Wormfood, and I can't stop listening. 

I mean it. I. Can't. Stop.

Jamaican Queens took the stage at The Bottle again Saturday night, armed with the twisted harmonies, toxic beats and unpredictable whimsy that make Wormfood so remarkable. The band kicked the show off by conjuring up the schizophrenic tune "Annie," slapping the crowd with its unsettling urgency and tumbling momentum before settling into a morphine-sweet chorus. The rest of the set was marked by what has become Jamaican Queens' calling card- a mix of hip-hop energy and dreamy wordplay alongside psychedelic drifting and electronic angst. The songs are calmly bitter, disconnected and yet earnest, romanticized dreams sizzling with loss and disappointment. The world in which the trio operates has been abandoned by convention, and strange things are growing wild. The characters that JQ populates this landscape with are hopeless, numbed by violence and failed relationships.

Show review: Janka Nabay & The Bubu Gang, Natural Information Society, Jamaican Queens at The Empty Bottle, 7/30

By Gene Wagendorf III

Janka Nabay and Boshra Al-Saadi

When you call yourself the "king" of anything, you'd better have the chops to back it up. Janka Nabay, the Sierra Leonean leader of The Bubu Gang, did just that at The Empty Bottle on Monday night.

When I spoke to the singer last week he confessed, "I love to see people dance. Not just to my music, but to any music, because dancing is like medicine. It keeps you fit. That's why we do this." The Bubu Gang wasted no time in inspiring their audience to move, beginning their set with a tropical jam featuring rolling bass lines and springy percussion. Nabay traded vocal flutters with Syrian chanteuse Boshra Al-Saadi, his wild, stream of consciousness raps bending around her smooth, glistening chants. The vocalists showed an incredible musical chemistry, working their voices through the interstices of the groove being laid out by the rest of The Gang.