Bad Batch - Review of Omah Lay's Clarity of Mind Album
Omah Lay's sophomore album is a brilliant but blurry emotional portrait that never finds its footing.
The water is gone. All that remains is smoke…well, mostly.
Omah Lay, the Nigerian pop artist, whose existential musings made him a success and a rarity in contemporary pop music, is out with his anticipated sophomore album Clarity of Mind.
On this body of work, the Port-Harcourt native is once again a broody genius with a restless spirit. His medium of choice, which he uses to exorcise his demons, is not water but a neatly rolled stick of the devil’s herb. His head writhes in the rolling thick clouds of Cannabis sativa.
The album’s opener, ‘Artificial Happiness,’ Omah Lay confesses to his reliance on weed as a supplement to manifest his hubris, while also admitting that he is in search of nirvana, where suffering, desire, and a sense of self do not exist. “E get things when I still dey find. Nirvana is one of them,” is his most lucid offering on the song.
‘Jah Jah Knows’ is a track about existential uncertainty wrapped in spiritual surrender. Omah Lay, a master at slurring and bending his words to fit into his melodious train of thought, is pulled by ambition and uncertainty on both sides. He is lost creatively and internally, “Chasing myself, make I no go…As you see, me, I no dey too sure. I don’t know what to do with my life. Everything I been know before. You can see me, I don’t know no more,” he cries out in anguish.
This is an artpiece by a painter coming undone. When Omah Lay surrenders to ‘Jah’, it is not resolution but surrender, an exhaustive surrender.
This is the motif that runs through ‘Clarity of Mind.’ Throughout the album, you sense that Omah Lay is in search of the next level of greatness, but doesn’t find it. This is the project’s central tension: a savant in pursuit of eternal glory, walking a torturous path many troubadours before him have already taken.
Omah Lay’s brilliance in exposing his dissatisfaction with life and fame becomes his undoing on Clarity of Mind. As he drifts from restlessness toward a deeper ache for apotheosis, the album never quite settles and leaves the listener unsatisfied.
In his loneliness, Omah Lay is desirous of the company of his lover, ‘Julia,’ but this folk-rock mash-up doesn’t hit the spot as an angst anthem or a solid effort about loneliness.
There is no beauty in Omah Lay’s confusion as ‘I Am’, as he misses out on a great opportunity to make a declarative statement. Rather, he chooses to settle on the mundane, a supposed tough guy without gravitas. The melodies on this song, though spectacular, do not wrap his lyrics the way a leather jacket wraps an outlaw biker.
Tempoe produces the closer, ‘Amen,’ a thumping track underscored by Amapiano elements and pierced by Omah Lay’s heavenly vocals. This track showcases the conceptual or thematic dissatisfaction with this album. His quest for financial security replaces his musings for greatness and glory scattered across the album. This then begs the question, “Is this nirvana?”
‘Canada Breeze’ and ‘Coping Mechanism’ featuring ELMAH are the best moments on the song. On the former, Omah Lay is at his most confident. It feels like the true closer for the album, as Omah Lay has overcome his depression and boasts about who he is without sounding like a tough guy. It is a clear march from here to Nirvana with Tempoe stumping on the track.
‘Coping Mechanism’ offers what might be Omah Lay’s antidote: companionship, a shoulder to lean on. With the better vocal performance on the project, ELMAH sings, “Smile for me, don’t be—don’t be sad. I can see it in your countenance, in your countenance.”
This is the conceptual breakthrough that should have anchored the album, but we don’t get enough of it.
Omah Lay’s reliance on weed, sex and liquor, Afrobeats’ three classic escape devices, is not the album’s flaw. The problem is what they produce: a blurry, indecisive emotional picture.
Clarity of Mind will seduce you with Omah Lay’s dissolving vocal delivery, pockets of melody, and stellar production, but after the rounds of sex, marijuana haze, and drinking rituals, a quiet dissatisfaction begins to gnaw at you.
Rating - 6/10
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