Long Songs That Earn Every Change of Direction

The bright synth pulse propels a story about Cleopatra in ancient Egypt, then the groove slows and shifts to a present-day scene. The turn feels like entering another room in the same building. Keeping the first half in your ear makes the modern setting more unsettling.

The opening rush of guitar and drums gives way to overlapping voices and a long, still passage. The organ builds a bridge from that quiet into a return of the earlier tune. Hear it as one side of a record and you can feel how much that pause changes the way the band comes back in.

The horns establish the tune and the rhythm section settles in long before anybody sings. When Fela enters, the chorus turns a groove you've already spent time with into a conversation. The wait is part of the music, because you know exactly what the voices are joining.

A lone ping leads into harmony singing and then an extended groove. The band pulls that firm footing away in the middle, leaving strange calls and space before the pulse comes back. The same melodic material sounds harder won after the time spent out of sight of it.

Private doubt passes through a heavily treated vocal and an exuberant group refrain. By the time the big electronic section gives way to a small acoustic ending, the same questions are back at a more human scale. The full digital track lets you hear those two changes in scale together.

Producer Teo Macero made the opening start and stop by repeating fragments of the band’s playing. Listen around nine minutes for the repeated keyboard-and-percussion figure. Those edits give you temporary points of reference amid a performance whose texture keeps shifting.

The five sections give the narrator space to move from self-introduction to a decision about leaving. The quieter address in the fourth section gives his certainty a wobble before the band races into the last one. You can hear which kind of bravado falls away and which kind he takes with him.

An intimate opening leads into the odd voices and sudden turns of the middle sections. The most satisfying change comes after the long, insistent organ passage, when a melody from early in the piece returns. That return makes a sprawling set of scenes feel like one trip back to a familiar place.

A circular piano figure makes the first stretch easy to settle into. A long percussion passage makes time feel much less regular in the middle, and the returning figure is recognizable even after the track has wandered so far. The studio recording makes a half hour feel like leaving and coming back to one place.

A delayed guitar part opens a little space before the riffs crowd back in. The turns are often sharp enough to feel like a new song is starting. When a sung passage comes around again, it gives you something familiar to carry into the next instrumental stretch.

After the loud show of authority early in the suite, the quieter discovery scene lets you hear somebody learning to play a guitar. When he presents it, the severe music of the authorities pushes back. Hearing the whole side makes those contrasting sounds part of the plot.

The track begins with a small guitar figure that sets the scale for the voice when it arrives. Later the band moves more urgently, then widens into a closing swell with voices behind the lead. The loud ending means more for having heard how tentative the opening was.

The opening melody grows into something close to a march as more players join. Much later, recorded speech and sparse piano leave a different impression of the space the band has made. The track has time to let its opening confidence ebb instead of cutting away at the first peak.

A road begins as a track through empty land and eventually becomes six lanes of traffic. The arrangement follows that change from a quiet opening to a full-band rush. When the words get down to one person's loss of work, the long guitar ending carries the scale of the story without needing another verse.