List of Demands is Damon Locks first widely distributed solo album. It follows the self-released 3D Sonic Adventure, a vinyl-only statement pressed in an edition of 250 copies in 2024. Whereas most listeners are likely to take it as the follow-up to New Future City Radio, Locks 2023 collaboration with Rob Mazurek, List of Demands is the result of specific circumstances -- and like everything the artist has done since the mid-90s, it can be sensed that it was made by the same person who fronted post-hardcore outliers Trenchmouth. An outgrowth of a project commissioned for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Locks home base of Chicago, List of Demands unifies spoken word with sound collage. It wouldnt be out of place in a stack of records that includes work by Nikki Giovanni, Amiri Baraka, and Linton Kwesi Johnson, or landmark hip-hop recordings spanning the 80s to the 2020s. Locks is a calm, observant, and empowering dub poet of sorts on all but two interludes and a piece featuring the image-rich words of poet Krista Franklin. Sampled voices swirl throughout the mix. Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis are heard on central track "Isnt It Beautiful," which begins musically like an early-70s news bulletin before giving way to Ralph Dardens splashing drums and Macie Stewarts alerting violin, then to looped drums that evoke Wild Style, then back to Darden and Stewart. Cleavers "Isnt it beautiful? All right!," regarding Black hair (and Blackness by extension), is at the fore at points, sometimes overlapping with Davis remarks on the state of the Black Power movement. Locks voice is in tune with all of it, describing artwork like a genial teacher or docent, and repeatedly echoing Davis. The title song places the listener in a protest march with insistent drums setting the pace, a group of girls chanting "Look out the way when you see me coming," and crowd noise throughout. Locks closes it by noting the demands: "beauty, form, destiny, love, time, future, and light," strongly emphasizing the last one. In "Distance," Locks reasons that "the distance between you and I is a fiction" before railing against housing discrimination and other racist cruelties that sow division. Theres also a tortured scream and desperate plea of "I never did nothin to you in my life!," a moment made all the more harrowing by violin that sounds as if its delivering high-voltage shocks. After an apocalyptic soul-jazz dispatch from Locks, the program ends with whats essentially an instrumental version of the opening "Reversed," albeit it with different voices and a subtle motivational message. List of Demands is both archival and of the present -- engrossing and energizing, to be blasted from every boombox. ~ Andy Kellman
Rovi