Sudan Archives - Natural Brown Prom Queen Review
Sudan Archives delivers one of the most confident and explorative albums of 2022.
Sudan Archive’s new album Natural Brown Prom Queen is a genre-bending offering that sees the musician coming to terms with her move to LA from her native Cincinnati and the ensuing homesickness. The opening track, “Home Maker”, hits us with a collage of sounds repeated, a jazz trumpet, a teasing melody — all leaning toward the Avant-garde. Then an electronic drum roll introduces Sudan. She asks us to “Step into her lovely cottage? Feels so green, it feels like fucking magic.” Her confessional continues, and as the sultry chorus comes in, she intones that she’s a “homemaker” as the driving pulse of the song continues. This song encapsulates what is to come on the album — collisions of musical styles that can fly by in a blink of an eye, Sudan’s disarming stream of conscious lyrics and catchy choruses all wrapped in the musician’s lush musical landscapes.
Sudan has given up trying to pigeonhole her music, saying it’s “like electronic fiddle, funk, R&B” and “If I wasn't a Black woman, that looked like ethnically ambiguous, then it wouldn't be R&B. But because I'm brown-skinned and I got the body of Janet Jackson, I'm R&B, I'm soul.” There is more to her music than just her R&B influences — she is clearly more M.I.A than Beyonce! She has fun with this assertion on the track Ciara, an epic ode to 90s hip-hop and R&B. Invoking the title’s namesake in her performance, Sudan channels the likes of Dre and Bone Thugs and, dare I say, R Kelly, all the while her larger musical vision never being far.
Also known as Brittany Parks, Sudan adopts the avatar Britt to work through the homesickness she felt for Cincinnati. In the song “OMG BRITT” (I feel her version of Ludacris’s “Move Bitch”), we see her dealing with the minefield of making friends in LA. This is a dark-sexual-miasma of a song that sees Sudan holding back the rolling clouds of other people’s negativity and opinion. At the same time, she battles with her self-doubt making this album, but deep down, she knows she’s on to something good, telling us, “Oh my God, Britt/They gone have a fit when they hear this shit.” She’s not wrong.
Natural Brown Prom Queen is a winding 18-track trip through Sudan’s inner journey from her hometown to finding her place in the world on the other side of the country — setting up home, sticking to her musical vision, becoming successful, race, breakups, cars breaking down on freeways, sex, love and friendship — an archetypical journey if there ever was one. And much like Beyonce’s recent Renaissance, this album is too dense to list all the influences — I got flashes of Vangelis while listening to the track “ChevyS10” just now as I write this! Just go and listen and find out for yourself and enjoy being taken on Sudan’s ride.