It's the best song on In Search Of Lost Time, but the hits don't stop coming. It's sorta reggae, sorta dancehall, but mostly it sounds like something totally new. It's a hypnotic, infectious, endlessly replayable song, and I don't know (or care) what genre you would call it. If you want proof that new and exciting things are happening within reggae right now, look no further than this album's opening track "Switch It Up," which sees Protoje teaming up with the genre's brightest new star, Koffee. A lot of his peers are on their first or second full-length album he's on his fifth, and it sounds just as fresh and inspired as anything he's done in the past. Protoje is one of the original leaders of the reggae revival, and he remains one of the most prolific. Moses is far from the only person bridging this gap - recent years have seen Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and others achieve similar feats - but with Dark Matter, he established himself alongside all of those artists as one of today's greats. Contributing instrumentalists such as Sons of Kemet’s Theon Cross, Erza Collective’s Joe Armon-Jones, and Nubya Garcia shine throughout the album as much as Moses does with his frenetic rhythms, reminding you that electronic production can go hand in hand with live-band jazz instrumentation. Standout moments come when UK soul singer Poppy Ajudha and Afropop singers Obongjayar and Nonku Phiri take the mic, and many of the instrumental songs hit just as hard.
Its futuristic production has more in common with what's currently happening within hip hop and electronic music than with what jazz sounded like half a century ago, and these aren't songs that you need to be a music scholar to appreciate these are songs you can get up and dance to (as was once commonly the case for jazz). If you still need proof that innovative, modern-sounding jazz comes out today, look no further than drummer/composer Moses Boyd's sophomore solo album Dark Matter.
Jazz gets (wrongly) criticized as a style of music that's become something academic, something where the goal is to learn and mirror the traditions of the past.
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