If you laid out the waveforms of a song onto paper, Khari Lucas once explained during a regional television interview, it might look like a contour map. This is what inspired the Charleston-based musician’s artist name, Contour, and it’s the sort of visual thinking you might expect from a musician who started out producing beats, as Lucas did. Onwards!, his second full-length as Contour, is the kind of music you make when you’re used to manipulating sound shapes on a laptop screen—loose, drifting, free, with many tracks resembling sampled two-bar loops. It’s difficult to tell, without production credits, which sounds are generated by live instruments and which are sampled, and the hazy nexus where one melts into the other is the spot where Lucas’ music lives.
It’s clear that Lucas considers his music as part of a larger project, linking him to a long lineage of Black artists: As a radio host for dublab’s Footprints in the Dark, he compiles two hours of music from a single Black musician each month, as a way to make what he calls his “research practice” public. The choice of archivist’s language feels pointed: Lucas is deeply invested in notions of Black musical inheritance and history. Throughout Onwards!, sampled voices repeatedly bob to the surface to lament, scold, or reflect. These samples all come from films made by the L.A. Rebellion, a group of filmmakers of color that came together in the late 1960s to highlight the lived conditions of Black Americans, leading to independent-cinema landmarks like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.
If this history sounds weighty, then it’s a testament to Lucas’ skill that Onwards! still moves like a raindrop down a windowpane—jagged, effortless, natural, unpredictable. The songs are atmospheric and purposefully blobby in shape, while Lucas’ supple singing voice has an improvisatory sense of play, tagging the track with offbeat, searching melodies like a muted trumpet. He has a penchant for locking onto a phrase—“I’m like 10 minutes from bankrupt,” from “Hearing Voices”—and testing out its many resonances, repeating it until every meaning—bitter, frightened, ironic, hopeless, matter-of-fact—has been exhausted. “The price of life I know I can’t afford/The tourniquet is always falling off ” he sings on “Skin Closure,” shaping the phrase into such a lovely, lilting shape it’s easy to miss its bleakness.
Despite the focus on mood-setting and atmosphere, you sense Lucas’ firm hand guiding every decision, pushing the music along its meandering path: the subtle creep of the bass that enters on “Trench Prayer,” or the loping cross-stick snare that opens up air pockets in the groove on “Hearing Voices.” In the close-stacked vocal harmonies of “You’d Do Well to Pack Light” that lag ever-so-slightly behind the beat, you hear a close study of Voodoo, and the distant spirit of the Soulquarians insinuates itself into the mix, both in jazzy, freeform bursts of texture and in the impulse to work away drowsily at a groove until it blooms open.
