Consumer Guide: July, 2025
Quiet music that's anything but insubstantial, Chuck D in conversational-philosophical mode, Chuck & Flav in politically conscious mode, and idiosyncratic protest songs about poverty and sexuality.
Backxwash: Only Dust Remains (Grimalkin) Just as a rapper, the Zambian-Canadian trans woman a/k/a Ashanti Mutinta is one of a kind. But not because her medium-tempo delivery is notably fluent or percussive. Fact is, it’s a little of both, though I expect its pitch and timbre would present masculine to most new listeners. What it wouldn’t present is well-gauged or powerful—there’s something approaching an audible agony here that’s reinforced by background textures with a density to them. Aside from an almost tossed-in “from the river to the sea,” the danger that surfaces is existential rather than political, and while both her music and her affect imply pervasive, imminent social peril, what exactly she proposes to do about a world on the brink is left unsaid. B PLUS