Amblings of a Messiah: A review of Wizard Chan’s ‘The Messenger’
Wizard Chan is symbolic sometimes — sermonic and brazenly prophetic at other times. He is a Nigerian indie alternative music artist releasing cool redemptive music as they find embrace in the arms of the teeming multitude. On The Messenger, he collects a tribe on his path to righteousness, with grimy bass drums and delightful strings as safeboats for escape, as he paddles on the brown hum of baritones into the one light.
We encounter conscious themes like spirituality, conviction, and interesting reflections on Wizard’s values and beliefs. He is a shaman toasting in patois, and in instances he lets the music swing, taking cues in motion from the cowries dangling at his shoulders.
He performs compellingly, painting with lyrics that could conjure dark clouds, yet poetically resolves to bring enlightenment. “Worry only takes away the peace of today / Not the problems that come with tomorrow / Emotion’s like a pregnancy it cannot be hidden / for a long time it’s a hard pill to swallow,” he softly unfurls on Demons & Angels.
But it’s not all straight skirts like Sunday School. Sometimes, like on Loner where he features Joeboy, Wizard is “with a bottle of rum and scotch / Let it mix my blood.” He also sings about burning trees to commune with God on Earth Song. As more believers absorb his message, some may begin to see Wizard Chan through his prism of spirituality; from different shattering colours uniting into one bright light.
Wizard Chan isn’t a monolith; he is various things and one thing at the same time, offshoots of spiralling branches, water flowing from multiple tributaries, or cards from a deck, each card bearing a distinct face united by intricate flourishes on its back. He hails from Port Harcourt, has studied in Ghana and served as a youth corp member in Sokoto. It’s easy to imagine how these multiple cultural experiences and a likely habit of introspection can afford him an expansive worldview that seeps into facets of his being.
However, seeking a broader angle to all this, we can recall the forerunner track The Messenger’s First Note cracking open to an ethereal spoken word of his manifesto and its origins for a message that has now taken form with his music. Other aspects of The Messenger soften features of an omnivorous spirituality, and we find new sparks in faces revealed from the deck on this album.
Wizard Chan persistently eludes the boxes of genres; as with the man, so with his music! The second track, Higher Powers grinds the duo Boma Nime’s spiritualities into the bass of traditional Igbe drums and shakers. It’s a folk song of praise asserting God’s omnipotence and featuring parabolic verses from Wizard about his faith.
He masterfully respawns mid-2000s Damian Marley, albeit with a slow coarser ijaw accent for his verses on Legacy. It is an inspiring performance with slow reggae rock on an ensemble of bass drills. Speaking of bass drills, a specifically scintillating style of drill basses accompanied by strings loops recur on this album with Demons & Angels and Pray Hard (where he features a high-praising verse from Dino Zee.) It is always delightful to find this blend, and these two songs will join a personal drill playlist with similarly arranged productions like Odumodublvck’s SHOOT & GO HOME and KAESTYLE’s Egberi.
The Messenger is an incredible debut project for Wizard Chan, an appreciation of his roots and a prophecy of his destiny. It’s a page for listeners who may try to understand him, and most certainly, it is a helluva jam.
