Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
The strange, dark psychedelia suffusing New Monuments might bring to mind the music of jaimie branch. The third album from vocalist-composer Amirtha Kidambi’s and her collective Elder Ones, is dedicated to the late avant-jazz trumpeter, and the album’s lineup includes two of branch’s regular collaborators: cellist Lester St. Louis and drummer Jason Nazary. Kidambi is a kindred spirit. Along with psychedelic and experimental jazz, her music carries strong currents of European chamber and Carnatic (South Indian classical) music, rock urgency, and—crucially—razor-sharp political consciousness.
The child of Tamil immigrants, Kidambi has more a than passing acquaintance with colonialism and its legacy around the world. Dismantling that legacy is a focal point for her art, and for New Monuments in particular. “We will build new monuments to/ Those who suffered centuries through,” she sings in the album’s title track. “We will build new monuments to/ Those who have no rights, those who lost their lives.” Here, Kidambi delivers the lines as a declamation; later, she reanimates them as a crawling, reverb-soaked croon; in between, she simply wails in a wordless, formless, Yoko Ono-like ululation. Why only articulate it in one style? It’s a manifesto with universal application.
Kidambi identifies specific examples in New Monuments’s other three tracks: the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings in the United States (“Third Space”), the resistance to farming deregulation in India (“Farmer’s Song”), the ever-relevant Israeli–Palestine conflict (“The Great Lie,” though this one is also applicable wherever oppression exists). Kidambi also invokes the women’s rights movement in Iran. Once again, she frequently shifts her vocal approach, implying the worldwide expanse of cultures under examination. Yet the global is also deeply personal: The examples in question involve Asians and Asian Americans—with a special emphasis on Asian and Asian-American women. Kidambi is not some detached observer—she’s got a personal stake.
It can be no surprise that the music expressing these sentiments is both urgent and gloomy. Sometimes those moods contradict each other; the droning cello and soprano saxophone (courtesy Matt Nelson) on “The Great Lie” is offset by a rapid staccato vocal from Kidambi, processed so that it sounds like martial orders coming through a loudspeaker. Elsewhere they’re complementary: If Kidambi (on harmonium), Nelson, St. Louis, and bassist Eva Lawitts play darkly and unhurried, Nazary’s urgent, busy drums energize rather than belie them. Together, they’re the sound of grim determination.
Indeed, grim determination is the through-line that gives New Monuments its ultimate definition. The resistance trudges onward, through the sinister waltz of “Third Space,” the requiem-like textures of “New Monuments,” the freeform chaos and electronic surges that rise in the second half of “The Great Lie”—maybe even through the loss of visionaries like branch, increasingly political as her brief career progressed. The new monuments of the title are the beacon: We, the downtrodden, march on toward this hopeful future that belongs to us.
