Too little magic on Yemi Alade’s Black Magic

Black Magic deploys Igbo highlife elements on ‘Kpirim’. She is still invested in pidgin. There is Yoruba rapper Olamide on ‘Jantolo’. The reduction in scope gives the newer album focus, but as before, the Yemi Alade idea still is to cover geographical ground without giving the music and lyrics as much consideration.

The aforementioned ‘Kpirim’ lifts and dumps Igbo highlife with neither modernisation nor innovation. Her vocals remain glossy but without character. The lyrics are better forgotten. There is none of the energy that she brings onstage. The recent single ‘Bum Bum’ has all of those drawbacks but its percussion-heavy dancehall production means it has club potential. It is one of those songs you have to dance to.

On her previous album, Miss Alade had kept a lid on her sexuality, producing songs that talked about materialism without hinting at the cost of those Ferraris and Bugattis. Here, she has a song ‘Mr. Stamina’ that while coy at least tells of female desire. It harks back to some of her older R&B songs. A proper R&B song ‘Yaba Left’ is one of the album’s better cuts. She resorts to such tired formulations to "My temperature dey high" but even so the lazy songwriting cannot quite ruin the song.

Considering the Yemi Alade catalogue, it is clear that Yemi Alade might be more devoted to American music than the traditional sounds of her country and continent. She might have succeeded in combining both on ‘Johnny’ but few of her more traditional songs show as much heart as that hit song.

So it is perhaps no surprise that one of the better songs on Black Magic ‘Wonder Woman’ is a slow-burn trap song produced by Falz collaborator Sess. The song presents one of the moments in the Yemi Alade discography where her social concerns work with her love for material success without producing a disproving shake of the head.

The presence of songs like ‘Talku Talku’, ‘Bread Butter’ and even the Olamide-featured track ‘Jantolo’ bloats this 15-track album. The deluxe version released this year adds more songs. These extra tracks don’t do a lot for the quality of the album but it does mean that there is space for ‘Go Down’, one of only two worthy songs that from Miss Alade since the success of ‘Johnny’. (The other song is ‘Charliee’.) Maybe if both ‘Go Down’ and ‘Charliee’ made this album, that “magic” in the title would actually mean more. As it is, the album has too little that is magical.  

Buy Yemi Alade's Black Magic on iTunes here