Allysha Joy: Light It Again | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- It’s the end of an exceptionally long year and, while it seems unwise to say it, some of that thick, cloudbank of insanity which has dominated the past twelve months appears to be dispersing. It might even be that the new year on the way heralds a step back from precipice, instead of a continued, head-long plunge into complete annihilation. In Naarm / Melbourne, especially, it must already seem like a new day. Some locals, rather than just getting on the beers, have their sights set a little higher up the shelf of aspirations. Allysha Joy for instance, the most public face of the 30/70 neo-soul collective, is already reaching across the world, even before we’re allowed to go there. The dark grooves and serious political intentions of her music are spilling forth, like a harbinger of her arrival. What I’m trying to say is that her new EP is released by stylish London institution First Word and, yes, it is definitely time to Light It Again.

Not that Alysha Joy is ever very far away from the biz. A prolific, globe-trotting performer with a back-catalogue to match, in the last half-decade Joy seems to have been putting stuff out, whether as part of 30/70 or by herself, whenever I turn around. Even during lockdown Allysha and 30/70 were smuggling out the jams: just look at the opening number Breaking Tense, on WAT Recordings' socially distanced mega-collaboration At Clouds Length.

I say ‘by herself’, but though this is Joy’s baby -as composer, lyricist and band-leader, she is also innately collaborative, much like the collective she’s been a part of - everyone shares their gifts: a solo here or a hand behind the boards there. Indeed, on her latest, just like her debut full-length Acadie Raw, you’ll find many 30/70 alumni and scenesters, the likes of Horatio Luna, Ziggy Zeitgeist, Danika Smith and Josh Kelly.

There’s even another echo of those trailblazers of Australian neosoul, Hiatus Kaiyote, with Clever Austin stepping in to mix things, much like Paul Bender did for the first 30/70 full-length. I get the feeling that the meeting of minds between Joy and Austin was an important one and a significant influence on the overall sound of Light It Again. Listening to it, back-to-back against Austin’s own record, Pareidolia, you can hear some of the same ethereal spaciousness which he likes to fill up to the brim with high-fidelity exotica.

Allysha brings different things: a dark and bass-guitar-heavy neosoul that is sometimes nearly skeletal and sinuous enough to draw a D’Angelo comparison, like on the song that is the EP’s title-track. As with his work, there’s moments where the downtempo saunter picks up the funky pace, just to show you that this engine room can move if it wants to. It does, too, the influence of many evenings listening to the Senegambian Jazz Band imparts a strong West African vibe and frisky syncopation on Better. Sometimes all of these ingredients come together at once, like on Joy’s epic and energised tribute to her grandmother that is EP closer, Mardi.

The lyrics are very much Allysha Joy's stock-in-trade, featuring her poetic but -really quite no-nonsense in fact- direct commitment to the issues that matter to her. From Watercolours, which pushes the idea of mindfulness and being present for the beauty of life, art and each other, she moves through that title-track, hammering home the power of women’s thought, the agency of their minds, against the traditional objectification of their bodies. Better takes on self-reflexivity, asking how struggles for social change must be waged against preconceived notions in our own minds. Joy takes it home with that long celebration of the heritage of female power, passed down from her grandmother, Mardi.

I had a moment of deja vu: you can hear Allysha making an impassioned call from the barricade on 2016’s Akala: “Before the seas do rise / I swear, I swear I’ll make a change.” On Mardi, I heard her sing “I know things must change, but I grip the walls we made.” Here we are, still making the same burning promises: call me a glass-half-empty but in four years of bitterly fought culture wars, sometimes it can feel like we’ve put in every ounce of effort into just trying to avoid going backwards.

Maybe, however, a new day really is dawning, even if the early morning sunshine is simply illuminating everything we still have to do. That is irrelevant: the time for fatigue is past, just pick up the tune and, as Allysha Joy puts it, Light It Again.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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