Today, the virtuosic musician Vernon Reid releases his new solo album, Hoodoo Telemetry, via Artone/The Players Club Records. Listen to the final single to be taken from the album In Effigy.
In Effigy presents both the victim’s and the aggressor’s perspectives on warfare, set to thunderous industrial drums. Talking about the song, Reid says, “That’s my wife’s favourite song on the record. I wrote about the idea of two perspectives in a war. One is from the commander of a unit. There has been a battle, and he’s exhausted. He stands on top of the hill with his weapon at his side. In the valley below, he’s burnt an effigy, and to the people down there, he’s not a hero, he’s an asshole and a destroyer. But the warrior, he’s not an ideologue. He doesn’t have a bone to pick with these people. He’s not political. He essentially accepts the notion that there are no answers, only orders. So that song is really the two perspectives, of the warrior and those who consider themselves victimised by the warrior.”
In Effigy follows the previous single Beautiful Bastard. “The word ‘bastard’ is attributed to men,” he says. “But I wanted there to be an ambiguity: is this about a woman, is it about a man? And I firmly believe it could be about a woman, absolutely. I wrote this song as a homage to doomed romance. It’s not about gender – it’s about when you know it’s doomed from the first kiss. And anyone who’s lived a full life will know of what I speak!”
The overdriven funk bassline and glistening soul of The Haunting finds Reid tipping his hat to a fellow chameleon (“I’m a huge Prince fan and there’s some of who he was in that song’s DNA”), before the scratch ‘n’ glitch of the brass-driven Bronx Paradox salutes the New York neighbourhood’s greatest musical export. “I wrote that in tribute to DJ Logic,” he explains. “Everybody considered the Bronx a wasteland, a warzone. But with hip-hop, those kids created the final original music of the 20th century.”
If you’ve followed the beats of his half-century career, you’ll know Vernon Reid as an artist who paints in every colour. Depending on the era you dive into and the album on your turntable, you’ll find the New York polymath pinballing between jazz, metal, punk, funk, electronica and hip-hop, cutting heads with collaborators as eclectic as Mick Jagger and Public Enemy, endlessly shedding his skin yet always speaking his truth.
Globally celebrated as a giant of the electric guitar (he was recently hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the top 50 players of all time), Reid’s Grammy Award-winning records with alt-rock trailblazers, Living Colour, still sound as fresh and fierce as when “Cult Of Personality” hijacked the Billboard chart in the late ’80s. But to take the pulse of the zeitgeist as he sees it – and hear his fearless musicality in microcosm – you need only drop the needle on his new solo album.
“Hoodoo Telemetry,” considers the 66-year-old of this kaleidoscopic 14-track opus, “is like a piece of my all-over-the-place mind. It took me a while to start this record because I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, managing my time with all my other projects. I was also in different spaces with these songs: some are new, others are reclamations of material from a long time ago. But suddenly, I found the focus and it was very clear to me: I gotta do this now.”
In hard times, Hoodoo Telemetry doesn’t have the answers. But to play Vernon Reid’s breathtakingly ambitious new album is to hear every shade of humanity and question where we are headed next. “These songs are looking at the past through a different lens, then looking forward,” he concludes. “Like, ‘Where is this going and how are we getting there? Are we driving the bus or are we passengers in this self-driving vehicle into the future?’
That’s the space that Hoodoo Telemetry is really exploring…”
