Moten cover
Released

Poet Fred Moten namechecks Ruth Wilson Gilmore, grabs lyrics from Aretha and Sly, and talks resistance over and over like a skipping stone bouncing across the lake made by bassist Brandon Lopez and drummer Gerald Cleaver. “You don’t get to not see, motherfucker,” Moten tells us, while he’s fighting a variety of downpressions. Moten is entertaining as hell and this album works outside both jazz and rap. This trio constructs itself from the sounds of construction, the way Lopez and Cleaver mimic the looping wheeze of a piston on “the faeries ornithologie” with strings and shells.

Sasha Frere-Jones

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