Album: Mansur Brown - Rihla

I like to think I’m open to most things, but even so I never thought that I’d be getting an education in prog metal in the summer of 2025. Let alone that it would be from groovy young Brit jazz players. But so it goes. Last week I interviewed the Wakefield-via-London trumpeter / singer / composer Emma-Jean Thackray and she revealed a youthful penchant for Dream Theater, Liquid Tension Experiment, King Crimson and even Marillion.

This provided a suden “ahhh” moment, illuminating certain tendencies in her music. And now comes South Londoner Mansur Brown’s third album proper, which kicks off with the headlong, full-on prog-rock wig-out of “Fasiha”. In Brown’s case, it’s a little less surprising: the influence was always there. His first instrument is guitar, his previous work has tended to consist of dance grooves (hip hop, trip hop, Afrobeats) merging into complex guitar compositions, and his last release Desta – The Memories Between’s biggest track was “Equilibrium”, an explosion of brutal rock/metal drumming and wild soloing.

The rock-outs here don’t dominate: there remain a lot of contemplative moments, as well as high drama produced by super-shiny Vangelis / Daft Punk adjacent synth work, and some fascinating heavily processed singing which resembles nothing so much as the new age floating of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. But other than the rolling jungle breaks of the glorious “Faded”, the familiar dance rhythms underpinning tracks are gone: maybe the closest cousin to this would be Tyondai Braxton’s works with WARP Records synth-prog monsters Battles in the 2000s.

Where Battles were flamboyant, though, Brown’s expression remains introspective – even, paradoxically, when it’s most in your face. This can lead, sometimes, to lulls in pacing, whether in ambient film soundtrack-like passages or during the intricate soloing of “Mansur’s Message Pt. 2”, where you feel like you’re being required to put in some study to get into his clearly deeply involved process. There are many instantly glorious moments here, and I’m quite torn in rating it: I am willing to acknowledge there’s a possibility that with the investment of time it will reveal itself as a classic. But it doesn’t give up its secrets easily, and if that is going to happen it’ll take a fair bit of hard listening work.

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