Review Summary: A clone of the self-titled debut. Not quite as good but still a good percussion-heavy album with a strong tribal/voodoo atmosphere
The second Exuma album, ‘Exuma II’, was released in 1970, the same year as Exuma’s self-titled debut album and closely follows the same sound and themes. Like the debut, ‘Exuma II’ is a very unique album that can best be described as ‘folk’.
Exuma, the alias of Tony McKay once again composes all of the music and plays nearly all of the instruments with the help of numerous male and female backing vocalists. ‘Exuma II’ continues with the debut’s Afro-Caribbean tribal sound influenced by Exuma’s homeland in the Bahamas (he was actually later given the British Empire Medal by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to Bahamian culture). The whole album is mainly percussion-orientated with complex and hypnotic bongo drumming and all sorts of chimes, bells and traditional percussion instruments adding to it. It is the percussion that really drives the album forward with the acoustic guitar only occasionally making an appearance.
Like the debut, ‘Exuma II’ focuses on creating a strong tribal voodoo atmosphere. While many bands advertise their music as ‘atmospheric’, it is hard to find something that really does seem to transport you to another place as well as Exuma does. With it’s chanting backing vocals, dense bongos and sometimes very dark lyrics mainly concerning voodoo, religion and Caribbean and African culture, ‘Exuma II’ brings forth images of tribes dancing round fires and at it’s darkest, séances and voodoo rituals.
Despite the emphasis on percussion, ‘Exuma II’ is slightly more melodic than the debut, with more acoustic guitar melodies. ‘Exuma II’ focuses more on making the songs catchy and slightly more ‘dancey’ without compromising the overall atmosphere. Apart from a few extra more melodic songs though, ‘Exuma II’ is almost the same as the debut.
That is the biggest problem with ‘Exuma II’. The structure of the album is exactly the same. The album opens with a very tribal-sounding song, followed by a pretty folk song, then an almost completely percussion-led ‘scary’ spoken word song with dark lyrics about summoning souls from the dead. This is the exact same pattern that was used in the debut and is followed throughout the album, with just a few more melodic songs thrown in near the end. While this does solve some problems of the debut like the short length and adds more melodic sections there are still certain spoken word parts that can get boring on repeat listens, though there are less of them and it ends up sounding like a poor imitation as most of the songs are weaker than their debut album’s counterparts.
There is some experimentation, but it doesn’t often work very well. On the first song for example, Exuma tries singing in a more melodic higher-pitched tone to his normally low-pitched raspy and bluesy delivery, but it ends up just sounding awkward. Luckily he abandons this style of singing after the one song. The use of harmonica in ‘Paul Simon Nontooth’ is a welcome addition though, making the spoken word with sparse percussion song much more interesting than the one on the debut. Exuma also attempts to expand his lyrical themes, adding to the religious themes with more political songs which he manages to fit into the music’s atmosphere remarkably well. His political songs are very pessimistic and negative - on ‘Fire In The Hole’ he claims that the president is walking hand in hand with the devil.
However, despite the experimentation with his sound he doesn’t really go far enough for ‘Exuma II’ to escape sounding like a slightly poor clone of the debut, so if you are new to Exuma this really can’t be recommended as a starting point, but it is still a good quality addition if you have the debut and want more.
