That tightrope—between structure and dissolution—is where the energy lives.
Pi Recordings
Brandon Ross – guitar; Melvin Gibbs – bass; JT Lewis – drums
Harriet Tubman has always sounded like a band operating slightly out of phase with everything around them, and Electrical Field of Love pushes that feeling even further. With Georgia Anne Muldrow woven in, the music doesn’t settle so much as it seeps in. It arrives hazy, thick, and low to the ground, then slowly pulls itself upright, dragging fuzz, echo, and grit behind it.
From the opening moments, the sound feels coated in something viscous. Brandon Ross’s guitar rarely comes across clean; it’s filtered and smeared, sometimes metallic, often looping back on itself in short, ringing figures that hang in the air. Melvin Gibbs’s bass thumps with weight and intention, less about outlining harmony than about making the floor vibrate. JT Lewis keeps things in motion without spelling anything out, his drums often sounding like they’re coming from another room, or another time.
Muldrow doesn’t appear as a featured singer so much as another element in the collective. At times she’s distant, half-buried in reverb, humming or chanting in ways that feel more ritual than song. Elsewhere she’s right up close, her voice frayed around the edges, vibrating between a moan and a cry. When words do surface clearly, they feel pushed up through electronics, distortion, and a layer of gauze.
The album moves as a continuous mass, with very little space between pieces. Grooves throb, tempos shift, and textures bleed together until individual moments are hard to separate. Hendrix is an obvious reference point in Ross’s playing—elastic lines, feedback-drenched climaxes—but the music pulls just as strongly from funk’s physical weight and the ache of Afro-roots blues. Ornette Coleman’s spirit lingers too, not as chaos, but as permission to abandon convention.
What stands out is how heavy the music feels without ever becoming blunt. Even at its most distorted, there’s a sense of restraint, as if an unseen layer is hovering over the band. Electronics swirl constantly beneath the surface, whooshing and bubbling, sounding like a controlled windstorm, or distant machinery. That industrial edge brings an unexpected calm, the feeling of standing still while massive forces churn nearby.
Beyond texture, Muldrow deepens the emotional center of the record. Her voice can sound wounded and stretched thin, then pivot toward something mantra-like and reassuring. Overdubbed harmonies turn her into a small choir, backing herself in real time. Even the quieter moments carry weight, her upper-register lines floating above restless rhythms.
Harriet Tubman is often described as a power trio, but that undersells how much space they leave within the density. Gibbs’s bass lines linger and ring out, Lewis favors repetition and texture over flash, and Ross’s guitar—scratchy and blistering one moment, unexpectedly elegant the next—holds the whole thing together without sanding down the rough edges.
By the end, it feels less like you’ve followed a set of songs than been carried through a single, shifting environment filled with tension. That tension is about control. The music could collapse into chaos, but it doesn’t. That tightrope—between structure and dissolution—is where the energy lives.
