Ibeyi
Ibeyi
XL
6/10
The opening track on Ibeyi’s self-titled debut, “Eleggua,” is a direct reference to Santeria—a religious order of the African Diaspora. Through the album these renegade Franco-Cuban sisters scrupulously skirt the minefield of trippy-dippy spirit-mother clichés. Rather, they have made a virtually placeless work, as if they’d journeyed across the centuries and the continents and returned with an amalgam of everything that stuck along the way—even if some of it might have been best left behind. “Oya” could almost be a medieval hymn that suddenly breaks into thundering tribal drumming; and Japanese gothic tinges suffuse “Think of You” with a remarkable ineffability. Lyrically, Ibeyi is a stunningly confessional work, as especially evidenced in “River”: “My ego and my blame / Let me baptize myself with the help of your waters.” Taken as a whole, the album is a ceremonial catharsis. But as any proselytizer would tell you…you’re just not going to convert everyone.
