Chidi Obialo is twenty years old, has fifteen releases behind him, and on Cantu of the Sower he sounds like someone who has already metabolized the entire history of left-field Black music and is now doing something else with it. The six tracks here move from arcade-game glitter to compression-straining bass, from languid trumpet to trash-compactor crunch, from sugary breakbeats to warm rushing brass — sometimes within a single minute. It should be exhausting. Somehow it isn't. The key is that Obialo isn't fidgeting. The swarming intensity has a center of gravity: wonder. Cantu of the Sower glows with it. The found-sound snippets of human chatter that surface throughout keep the record tethered to the world — this is music made by someone who is listening as hard as he is playing. A sampled Stokely Carmichael line makes the politics explicit without turning the album into a lecture. Obialo was raised in Nigeria and moved to the US at age seven. As a teenager he began releasing wildly varied, collagist work with the explicit aim of creating a 'rabbit hole' — a body of music deep enough to get genuinely lost in. He's serious about the rabbit hole. His catalog already branches in multiple directions: the Sidepeices duo with Atlanta's Stickerbush runs toward glitchy humor; this year's Westside Trapped is a more approachable, affectionate love letter to Nigeria, compared by the Guardian's Laura Snapes to Sault's luxuriant spirituals. Cantu of the Sower sits at the harder end of the spectrum — closer to the Captain Beefheart shirt Obialo wears in press photos than to anything on a streaming algorithmic playlist. Fela Kuti-worthy hand percussion sweeps away into a hallucinatory howling tide of guitar. Sprite-like playfulness tips into maximalist peaks. The found-sound humanizes what could otherwise be alienating density. At fifteen releases deep and still twenty years old, Obialo's talent for what Snapes accurately calls 'delirious, head-spinning beauty' is not a promise — it's already a fact. The question for Cantu of the Sower isn't whether he can pull it off. It's whether you're the kind of listener who can stay inside the rabbit hole long enough to feel what he's going for. If you are, this record pays out.
