Mourning [A] BLKstar Deliver a Rich and Nuanced Album

It’s far too easy to take things for granted while they’re happening. As Joni Mitchell put it, all the way back in 1970 on “Big Yellow Taxi”, “Don’t it always seem to go / You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” Perhaps it’s just human nature to focus on what we lack. Maybe it’s just the demands of keeping our bellies full and roofs over our heads, which seems to only get harder and harder with each passing day. All the more reason to appreciate what we do have, as expressed so eloquently on Mourning [A] BLKstar’s first album in five years.

Mourning [A] BLKstar are an Afrofuturist collective from Cleveland, weaving a fascinating tapestry of jazz, soul, hip-hop, and experimental music to investigate the shifting shape of Black music and culture in the 21st century. Obviously, this will include far too much pain, hardship, injustice, and inequality. A lot of media reduces the Black experience to suffering, flattening the beauty, strength, and complexity into just more trauma porn.

Cleveland soul jazz collective Mourning [A] BLKstar give voice to Black joy and excellence on Flowers for the Living without succumbing to saccharine corniness. Lyrically, thematically, it’s incredibly positive, powerful, and uplifting. Musically, it’s got shadows as well as light, delivering a rich, nuanced album that lives and breathes, dancing and singing as well as shouting and occasionally throwing stones.

Flowers for the Living takes on the duality and didacticism directly from the very first moment, going beyond trite moralizing to deliver something more timeless and profound. On album opener “Stop Lion 2”, singing about staring at the ceiling until a pattern emerges and the shadows run together, while a trumpet sounds a bright golden Spanish melody over a knotty beat. It’s more short story than fairy tale, more John Cheever than Cinderella, sounding like an open window on a sultry summer evening in Spanish Harlem.

“Can We?” addresses the problem even more directly, asking if it’s okay to be funky during hard times. Its mission statement is spelled out clearly and directly on “Flowers for the Living”, with its hypnotic refrain, “Flowers for the living / For the living are the truth.” Life is always messy, especially while it’s happening. Mourning [A] BLKstar encourage leaning into that messiness in all its raw, ragged glory.

That’s not to say Flowers for the Living isn’t political. Although it sounds like a tight, muscular funk song, “Lil’ Bobby Hutton” is about a Black Panther that the Oakland Police Department gunned down. It’s like Bob Dylan‘s “Hurricane” backed by Miles Davis‘ Bitches’ Brew band. It’s not afraid to avoid being political, either. “88 pt 1 and 2” is inspired by the experience of going out dancing, recreating the feeling of packed dancefloors with its shifting arrangements and hypnotic rhythm. “Letter to a Nervous System” is a love letter to the romantic slow jams LaToya Kent grew up singing in her family’s car.

This detailed, nuanced presentation makes Flowers for the Living even more effective as a political statement. It’s so dense and engaging that it makes you want to listen over and over again until its melodies become a part of your marrow, creating a passionate, inspired, and inspiring window into what it’s to be Black in 2025, in all its glorious complexity.