In the same week that Zeez made the news for losing his fight with former employers HF Music, Brymo made the news too, for describing his relationship with his own former bosses with the most colorful language.

Brymo used equally colorful language in naming his sixth studio album. However, when asked to actually describe the thinking behind the title, the former Choc Boy went into the type of highfalutin explanation that would make the “internet intellectuals” that form his core audience these days very proud.

It’s a Greek word for ‘key”… this album is the key to a certain door I have knocked on for years and yes it was meant to be sensual, there ought to be two sides to the coin.

To paraphrase Mr. Olawale – even though the sternness in my voice makes “Let’s make love” less of a passionate request and more of lustful demand, even though my album’s opening song (Naked) and its cover art seem to mirror each other, the album isn’t actually about “opening leg”. Instead, Kl?tôr?s is a deep dive into the mind of a musical genius who’s simply not content with having you experience his music in 1D.

Take “Billion Naira Dream” for instance, place this song’s central theme in the hands of most of Brymo’s colleagues and you instantly know what you’re going to get – I want to be the next Dangote, I want a mansion in Lekki, blah blah blah. With Brymo, you get something totally different, a contradictory tale of patience and eagerness, of contentment and ambition.

I’m a man with many faces /

And my life’s in many phases /

I crawl when I’m running /

I’m cold when I’m burning

You see, Brymo is a big dreamer but the closer he gets to his dreams, the farther away they seem to get on “Mirage”. It’s frustrating. If you feel the same way, you can take his call to “get high”, over a deliberately kooky beat, as an invitation to light one up and forget your problems or rise and take your destiny in your own hands. That’s the blank sheet that Brymo and long-time producer Mikkyme Joses allow listeners draw their own conclusions on.

At times, that blank sheet is heavy, a lot of times, its dark. I guess it’s safe to say that Brymo has abandoned plans to follow up 2012’s “Good morning” with another mainstream hit in 2016 and beyond. “Happy Memories” comes closest but the record’s breezy, alternative sound means you’re more likely to hear something like it on Rick Dee’s Weekly Top 40 than on JAJ’s Top 7 Jams at 7. Sadly, without the wide audience his music used to enjoy, the song will probably struggle to get on either one. On the enchanting “Dem Dey Go”, he aims a thinly-veiled shot at Chocolate City – one of those who could have helped “Happy Memories” and the like cross over. But at the same time, he reflects on the price he’s had to pay for independence – “freedom is a kind of prison”.

If there is one down side to the album however, it is that we’ve heard most of this before. It sounds like rather than releasing his fourth album Tabula Rasa as a 22-tracker, Brymo saved 10 songs from that project and made Kl?tôr?s a couple of years later. Then he took the last song on Kl?tôr?s and split it in 2 to make “The Way the Cookie Crumbles” and “The Girl from New York”. Both Tabula Rasa and Kl?tôr?s sound like one extended playlist, just like the closing 2 songs on Kl?tôr?s.

However, if Tabula Rasa was so unanimously adjudged to be an underground classic, is that such a bad thing? It’s the consistency versus growth argument and I think I’d much rather take Brymo being consistently good over Brymo being consistently inconsistent.

Buy/Download Brymo’s Kl?tôr?s here