BLK ODYSSY continue to be the most dynamic, immersive live show in music | w/ Asha Imuno and Benji
Evan Dale | October 2, 2024
I’d seen them at this venue before. In 2022, fresh on the heels of the release of their 2021 debut album, BLK VINTAGE – and the 2022 reprise of the same work – BLK ODYSSY – then already an indefinable group of stylistically dynamic instrumentalists and vocalists with a silver-tongued, poetically entrenched frontman – had graced the Larimer Lounge with their performative immensity. The oft-sullen, emotionally deep-diving, artistically bold album – very much a rainy weather coming-of-age tale blistered with angst and sex – felt at times at place, and at others overdressed, in the dimly-lit, half-full bar-in-the-front-stage-in-the-back hollow in Denver’s River North neighborhood.
Two years later, the same stage hosted the same band, banded together by mostly the same select artists, for a vastly different kind of show.
Unless you’re new to BLK ODYSSY, that likely isn’t surprising. Never has the group delivered anything twice other than the guarantee to be creatively bold and experimentally raw. On their tour in the wake of 2023’s sophomore album, DIAMONDS & FREAKS, the band – who I caught at the hallowed ground of LA’s Moroccan Lounge – delivered a fiery soul explosion to a sold-out crowd of dedicated listeners sardined well over capacity into the Art District. Delving deeper into an instrumentally driven and vocally centered performance, BLK ODYSSY – just as they had done in 2022’s lyrically pervasive and thematically entrenched album and tour – put on a show worthy of and in step with their most recent aesthetic explorations.
I’d see them do this before. And yet I hadn’t. I was again swept off my feet by the most dynamic band in music putting more into their performance and bringing their contemporary offering more to life in subsequence, than I had ever see at a show by any other artist, even the two previous BLK ODYSSY shows I’d seen.
Unless you haven’t heard their 2024 album, that likely isn’t surprising. 1-800 FANTASY is a blinding spout of soul and sex riddled with punk-spewing angst. It is largely an indefinable work, without listing countless subgenre niches throughout decades of musical roots, and without listing all too many adjectives. It is simply vast without ever losing its grip on the most well-traveled of punk, soul, and hip-hop roots. Seamlessly able to fold in the rest of their influences – hip-hop, rap, spoken word, neo-soul, jazz, R&B, metal – BLK ODYSSY’s 2024 The Fantasy House Tour – which culminated earlier this week in LA – was everything we’ve come to expect from a band whose musical direction is always unexpected and unpredictable. Range is the driving force in their collective work. Energy and intensity are the adjectives that best describe how their shows are different from so many others. Opting often for divey venues, they imbibe the raw nature of their sound and the stories they tell through it, immersing a listener in an hour or more of timeless performance art, drowning the audience and the sticky, beer-covered wooden floors they stand on, with palpable energy and enduring music.
The front man, mic in hand, arches over the crowd from the 18-inch stage, sweat dripping from the tip of his nose, and bellowing so loudly that the mic itself seems almost ceremonial rather than necessary. The guitarist – Rico – stomps on his warp petal, emitting waves half from his instrument, and half seemingly from his own deeply sexual movements to the music. The drummer, masked and shirtless, never stops trying to snap his sticks. The whole of the band neither deliver hip-hop nor metal, but some amorphous, ever-evolving grey area in between all sounds, stealing the hearts of the crowd, even while keeping us all dizzied and disoriented in the search of sonic footing.
Naturally, the friends BLK ODYSSY bring along on tour, too, defy any preconceived notions of genre and its expected parameters. Stylistic range on this night at the Larimer Lounge is a reflection of BLK ODYSSY’s own evolution, growth, and seeming distrust of expectancies. First, Benji: the guitar-slinging Pittsburgh native whose own range fits right at home alongside his fellow Spillage Village teammates just as it does sharing a stage with BLK ODYSSY, opens the show with a soft-edged, lyrically immersive, and warm introduction to the evening ahead. His calm demeanor shines through in his music without losing the knack for poeticism that makes him a rising standout in the post-genre maneuverings of so many with whom he shares stages and studios.
Then: Asha Imuno. Funk-laden, fun-loving, and of course wide-ranging, the rapper, vocalist, and producer simultaneously does everything in balance on stage. Seamlessly weaving through a varied collection of his canon, his set is as assorted as his outfit, His vocals are as strong as his lyricism, and his production tethers both ends of his creative acumen akin. At times mellow and downtempo, and at others bass-thudding and jumping all over, Asha’s time sets the stage even further for BKL ODYSSY’s set to come.
By the time it does, the audience is ready for just about everything. And yet, under the dim red lighting, BLK ODYSSY’s set is – as each have been over the last few years – entirely new, refreshing, and yet oh, so nostalgic in a way that can’t really be put into words.