“The new album from Steve Lands -Rearranging the Planets – is a monumental success…

Large-ensemble Afrofuturism that offers fanfare worthy of Fela, but that unfolds in textures closer to recent Meshell Ndegeocello or Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, the wind-instrument melodies summoning the classic mid-60s Blue Note sides, the guitar landing somewhere between the Isley Brothers and James Blood Ulmer and the deepest Delta root to blend with keyboards that conjure an atmosphere of rainy twilight and the taste of honey, and, throughout, a sequence of bass-and-drum grooves that drive with such insistent conviction that, whatever this is, it surely guides you into a place that has neither beginning nor end, nor will you be able to resist having it on loop as your personal summer soundtrack by way of recharging your energies for whatever, in the course of time, is coming our way.

The album’s spoken words are direct expressions of the music and vice-versa, and they inspire and support introspection about one’s own ways of making time for what is outside of time: the beauty of love and the love of beauty, the devotion - to be precise – to ancestral wisdom and to passing it along to descendants. This, to me, is what the new album from Steve Lands is and does.”