Look around the West Australian music scene at the moment, and you’ll see something brewing. Sure, there’s the old, regular triumvirate of hip hop, psychedelic rock and jazz – the cornerstones of Perth, if not WA music, with drum and bass taking a definite place among the cadre in recent years.
But beyond that, there’s a slew of acts pushing the limits in all those modes of music, and taking strong steps to define their own environment.
POW! Negro, alongside contemporaries like Koi Child and other breaking national artists like Remi and Sampa the Great, are not into categorization. While their inspirations take in Rage Against the Machine, MF Doom and A Tribe Called Quest, there’s more to say on the young six piece than just jamming jazz in with hip hop: the fluid immediacy, energy and aggressiveness of the band’s delivery has granted them a lot of clout.
“It just kind of fell into our laps, really,” drummer Rhys Hussey said.
“Nelson, the MC of the band, it’s all kind of started from his ideas and spread out.
“He’s been friends with the Koi Child guys for a while, so we’ve been really lucky to be surrounded by this really supportive musical environment. They’d learnt the ropes before us, so from that were were really able to start writing from this really strong position on how to create music without being too distracted by the more… distasteful parts of the industry.”
“But I think the really good thing is we all come from really different backgrounds. There’s classically trained jazz musicians, there’s rock musicians, and Nelson’s just this amazing hip hop lyricist.
“And I think it works for a couple of reasons. One, there’s a lot of young guys in the band who haven’t necessarily gone through the band processes before, so there’s just a lot of freedom for us to absolutely do it the way we want to do it.
“And then everyone’s just 100 per cent in. With this EP, we really wanted to start and finish a project together, as a band. So we’ve built our own studio and basically have done everything to record it.”
The resulting release, Jasmine and Licorice, is a driving, jagged piece of rebellious expedition, throwing out ten times more youthful vigour and idealism more than any half-baked vampire movie.
Nelson Mondlane’s lyrics have continued to revolve around issues of race, gender, mental health and social conscience; this time they’re even more punctuated by the staccato onslaught of the full band, thankfully becoming so much more tight over this recording.
“I think coming into this EP we knew that not everything went exactly how we wanted it last time, so right from the start we had that mindset of everything going the way we want it to.
“When we started, we didn’t want to make any on genre, but we knew we had these influences and what it turned out like – like what Koi Child have – made us giddy. We just thought to ourselves, ‘Wow, what is this?’ So I’m really glad we’ve been able to pull that out again.”
POW! Negro bring Jasmine and Licorice to Rollercoaster on August 25 for Hooch. Tickets are available now through Eventsi.