Review Text
Da Lata's highly anticipated fourth album Birds is a genre busting journey through London Afro-Brazilian soul music. The most homogeneous Da Lata record to date, Christian Franck has honed his craft and expanded his art to create a glowing testimony from the melting pot of the capital's musical life. Gathering his family of collaborators with diverse musical backgrounds in soul, jazz, and gospel as well as African and Brazilian forms, Birds is an album that finally lays waste to that tired idea of World music. There are tracks that are inspired by Chris' journeys to the source, there are elegant horn and woodwind arrangements recorded in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, there are lyrics in different tongues, but this is a London record.Birds is an album of warm organic grooves infused with sophisticated funkiness and splattered with instrumental colour. From the Afro skank swagger of the low slung opener Mentality to the Beatles-esque pathos of the closing title track, it's a record packed with soulful surprises and beguiling rhythms. The sound is both intimate and expansive, drawing the listener into Da Lata's London tropicalia and out into the cosmos. Birds is an album about keeping doors open and conversation flowing, it's about survival, hope, family, resistance, awareness, unity and love.
