With every album, Brymo seems to recalibrate his sound and artistic preoccupations.
He began his career by experimenting with R&B and Pop. After a controversial fallout with his record label, Chocolate City, restlessness, an instinct for reinvention and survival became a defining trait for him. To bolster his confidence and improve his career, he turned to Alternative Soul and Fusion Rock, Soft-Reggae and Neo-Folk. His last three albums, the bipartite 9: Èsan/Harmattan and Winter, Theta, and Macabre, further expanded and diversified his discography.
Still, Brymo isn’t relenting in his exploration and experimentation. On Christmas Day, a day Christians observe to mark the birth of Jesus Christ, he released Shaitan, a double album that felt anything but accidental. Just like his previous two-pronged albums, 9: Èsan/Harmattan and Winter, Shaitan: Telekinesis/Arodan are characterised by Alternative Folk, Neo-Folk, and Folk Ballads.
Melancholic, introspective, and atmospheric, the albums explore the themes of love and lovelessness, deception and honesty, profanity and lust, fatherhood and resilience, tied together by the European Neo-Folk concept and Yoruba folkloric effects.
By splitting the record along linguistic and stylistic lines, Brymo appears to be attempting a smoother narrative progression. Yet the strategy is not without consequence. In an age where listeners often move through albums without pausing for conceptual markers, such divisions can easily blur, creating interpretive confusion rather than cohesion.Telekinesis, especially, could have been a delightful musical piece but it ends up over-complicated by Brymo’s dithering and vague songwriting, and overburdened by his exaggerated vocal performances.
There is a temptation, when writing about Brymo, to begin with controversy – his provocations, his ideological abrasiveness, his knack for unsettling the Nigerian moral consensus. Shaitan: Telekinesis/Arodan makes that temptation almost irresistible.
Telekinesis, the English part of the album, opens with “Mother and God.” On the surface, the song looks as though Brymo views motherhood as sacred and relates it to divinity. Maybe the Virgin Mary? But after a careful examination of the lyrics, his messages prove otherwise. It’s a heartbreak song veiled as a reference to the sainthood of the Virgin Mary. “She made space in the center of my mind / As I did the same in her body / And I should never stay too long / She couldn’t even if she wanted me to,” Brymo sings, his voice laden with emotions.
After adding that he couldn’t anticipate her barging in, and his unwillingness to stop her from leaving, Brymo crashes out in the chorus, questioning his identity. “Holy Mary, mother and God,” he screams, “Who the hell do I think I am?” Despite struggling with an identity crisis, he embraces his unique individuality rather than imitating others.
If “Mother and God” signals the end of a romantic affair, and Brymo’s unwillingness to change who he is, the subsequent track, “Cold”, tells us how emotionally detached and ruthless he is with hm admitting to be cold and old. Proving how cold blooded he can be, he compares himself to the barrel of a gun, saying that he feels like he knows where bullets go before they kill.
The second verse paints a vivid picture of his fierceness. “The feel of my touch is chill to your bones,” he sings, depicting that he isn’t afraid of violence. The gun knows that he will never stop when he holds the trigger.
Deviating from his specious rhetoric on “Mother and God” and cold-blooded intent on “Cold”, Brymo keeps things simple and smooth on “Heaven Street”. Lamenting about unreciprocated affection, he asks a nihilistic question: “Who cares about unrequited love?”
Sounding weary, he expresses his discontent with the lack of loyalty in their relationship. but tired of being disrespected, he accepts his fate and is ready to live in the throes of his own hell.
By the time the album closes with “Wild Goose Chase,” exhaustion has set in for Brymo. Tired of his foolish, hopeless search for love, relevance, and the pursuit of happiness, he pleads that the mirage should be taken from him. Sung in Yoruba and Nigerian Pidgin, “Wild Goose Chase” transitions to become “Arodan”, the title and opening track on the Yoruba segment of Shaitan. Serving as a link, the song neatly ties the albums together, indicating that they are one.
Arodan, however, isn’t the same as Telekinesis because where the former is eccentric and confounding, Arodan is brazen and incantatory.
On “Okiki”, which I believe is the actual opening, Brymo narrates how he sojourned into a town and stopped by a house. He is welcomed by the occupant. But, instead of being treated with respect as a sojourner, he is requested to perform some domestic chores before he can eat or drink palmwine. Learning that the community’s chief is responsible for the mischief, he decries the chief for trying to turn him into a slave. He blames everything on his fame, which he believes the chief is jealous of. But that might not be the case.
The Chief could have heard about Brymo’s provocative activities and decided to treat him unkindly so that he could leave the community. Who knows!
Brymo often makes profanity sound like a righteous act with his risque ditties disguised as high art, and meant to stir conversation about him and his music. On the raunchy “Ìyá Àwẹ̀lé,” he recounts his dalliance with the titular character; a sexual relationship which for the light-skinned and well-endowed Ìyá Àwẹ̀lé is fuelled by retaliation towards her husband who abandons her to sleep with his second wife or go hunting for game. Brymo’s soulful and carefree rendition of the secret affair makes his indecency look like a service of mercy and love.
Sounding inconsolable on “Osika,” Brymo cries that he sold himself cheaply to the wicked. His martyrdom isn’t convincing. We are not told how he sold himself into chaos.
No matter how morally depraved a person is, they will never wish the same on their children. “Ọmọ Mi Ọwọn” sees Brymo admonishing his child not to inherit his provocative traits. “Ọmọ mi ọwọn, Baba rẹ ogbọn tóó, dárí ji mí o (Dear child, your father isn’t wise, please forgive me),” he sings, admitting his imperfection in a moment of vulnerability. The brilliant song continues Brymo’s aptitude for directing his children to the straight and narrow path as he did on “Olarenwaju” off Oso and “Adedotun” from Yellow. But the song is more similar to “Dear Child’, off Tabula Rasa, where Brymo celebrates his wise grandma, who warns him that “life is nothing but vanity.”
Brymo is a preacher on the hymn-like “Ikorira”, where he sermonises that we should resent those who despise others for no reason. “Akóni lẹ́rú rí òlè dọ̀rẹ́ tó n gbe ni níjà / Akóni lẹ́rú kòyẹ kó dọ̀rẹ́ tó n gbe ni níjà (The slaver can’t be a friend who supports one during trouble / The slaver isn’t supposed to be a friend in trouble).”
He gleefully closes the album with the celebratory and incantatory “Madarikan” which plies the trajectory of the Yoruba spiritual concept of victory over enemies, both seen and unseen. Madarikan signifies divine protection and triumph, often used in traditional practices for overcoming adversaries, similar to spiritual armour.
Brymo’s music, once animated by melodic curiosity, intellectual reasoning, and mischief, now feels unexciting and drab. Burdened by a heavy conceptualisation, and overtly philosophical reasoning it mistakes abstraction for depth and seriousness for insight, thus making listening to Telekinesis feels like a tedious task.
Brymo has become a sophist who overcomplicates even the simplest things. The songs on Telekinesis are so cryptic that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what he is singing about. It’s hard to squeeze meaning out of “Everything Return To Source,” due to its nebulous lyrics and Brymo’s nasal enunciation.
By surrendering entirely to surrealism, Brymo sabotages his own project, allowing indulgence to eclipse what could have been a powerful convergence of absurdity, existential terror, and desire.
The only seemingly clear-cut songs on Telekinesis are the lovelorn “Heaven Street”, resilience and courageous “Warlock … Warlord”, and the surrendering “Wild Goose Chase”. Regardless, the arrangement of instrumentation on the album is commendable.
In contrast to Telekinesis, Arodan stands out as a finely created album, one that narrates its stories with confidence and flair. Its unhurried, bragging, and reflective approach allows Brymo to deliver work that is at once philosophically engaging and genuinely entertaining. It’s a brilliant inclusion to his discography.
Music is communication. But how do we appreciate music when the messages are vague? On Telekinesis, Brymo seems to be communicating with himself and intent on not letting anyone eavesdrop.
The joke, however, is on him this time.
***Michael Kolawole is a screenwriter, playwright, poet and cultural journalist/critic. Catch him on X @mykflow
