AMANAZ
Issued in 1975, Africa by Amanaz is the articulation of Zambia’s Zamrock ethos. While other albums – Rikki Ililonga’s Zambia, WITCH’s Lazy Bones!! – are competitors, it’s hard to best this album as it covers each major quadrant of the Zamrock whole: it came from the mines; its musicians were anti-colonial freedom fighters, it envelops Zambian folk music traditions, and it rocks – hard.
There’s a darkness to Africa not found on any other Zamrock records, and a melancholy drifts throughout, specifically on Mpofu’s more restrained “Khala My Friend,” which stands as an effective, bleak situation for the Zambian everyman, the average citizen of a struggling, new nation, who might have had relatives in conflict-torn countries on the horizon, who might have been struggling to find his next meal, who might have seen a bleaker future than his president promised. Then there’s the clear Velvet Underground-influence on the nostalgic “Sunday Morning,” which, as Kabwe recalls, was the first song written for the album, back in 1968, when Velvet Undergound and Nico was a new release – and the underground funk of “Making The Scene.” The album also tackles traditional Zambian music and early-‘60s rock – punctuated, of course by Kanyepa’s wah-wah and Mpofu’s fuzz guitars. But every time Amanaz get too deep, too violent, they come back with an accessible song and woo their listener back to the groove. “Green Apple” is a civil song, featuring Kanyepa’s sighing guitar.
It is a perfectly arranged album, from the dichotomy of Mpofu’s and Kanyepa’s lead and rhythm guitars, to the vocal harmonies, to the rhythm section’s sense of space and time, which allows Africa’s funk to build. Inexplicably, Africa was given two separate mixes and two separate presses: one version is dry, with the vocals and drums mixed loud, the other slathered in reverb, with the vocals and drums disappearing into the mix, and with the guitar solos mixed much louder. Now Again Records has presented them both here on compact disc as they each have their appeal: it’s up to the listener to pick the one he or she prefers. This is a highpoint of the Zamrock scene and we hope that this can be seen as its definitive reissue.
PRESS FOR AFRICA
“Amanaz were a group that eagerly embraced the music of the West, but just enough of their own sound and perspective comes through to make Africa compelling listening as well as a fascinating artifact of an almost unknown rock scene. It’s good enough to make the band’s short lifespan seem like a sad, almost tragic waste of talent and potential.”
“Africa is one of those albums we should at least consider ourselves lucky to even get a chance to hear.”
“What ultimately is so impressive about Amanaz is the sense that one is listening to a band perfecting a new sound without laboring to do so. It is this delicate balance that makes Africa not only a record of two worlds, but one well deserving of a place in the rock ‘n’ roll canon.”
“The main event is a Zambian recreation of late 1960s UK psych, sweet and buzzy, with less of the Central or Southern African sound, more of the British. Zambia was part of Rhodesia until 1964, a British colonial possession, and one of the conclusions an outsider can draw from an album like Africa, a reissue of a 1975 LP, is that the coloniser’s records must have continued to flow into the country even after independence.”
