Olatunji Olugbenga Omotayo Olanrewaju Adetokunbo Abdul Majeed Onabule, better known as Onabule did it again and that is, surpassing himself. Just like it’s predecessor Ambitions For Deeper Breadth In Emergency, Brake Silence is another great soul album that has everything we love about Ola’s music, original, self-written songs, a warm, organic musical background, meaningful lyrics and of course Ola’s great voice.
The opener Soul Town is a great piece of midtempo soul that finds Ola lamenting over the fact that the dreams and hopes we had in the past are unfulfilled today (”Somebody tell me what happened to all those dreams of peace/ And understanding and harmony and brotherhood and love/ Being together for ever and ever/ Don’t it seem like Soul Town, Soul Town is gone“).
Heart Of Lead is story telling soul about an former lover, who wants to re-activate the bonds of love but to Ola this just doesn’t make sense.
A priceless, excellent ballad comes with Love Affair, thanks to spare instrumentation this is the perfect vehicle to show Ola’s vocal capability. Of equal class is the album’s closing ballad Forgiven. I think it would be very interesting and musical satisfying to hear Ola with a classical jazz trio (piano, bass, drums).
Funky midtempo songs like Savoir Faire or Need To Know round things nicely while Going Away might surprise you with its rock-influenced guitars. But after all this is all pure Ola and the music he wants to make or like he said in an interview with Echoes “But I won’t be doing this with a major label. Those days have gone. I’ve seen people who have built something special the independent route and then fell for the big cash offer, and all their uniqueness goes. I won’t trade that.”
To sum it up this is the perfect album for those who are into pure, unaltered soul music that comes from the very heart of a man. Ola gives us the very essence of soul.

For more infos visit ola-onabule.co.uk.
[edit: In Emergency, Break Silence will be released in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg on April 18th 2005 ZYX Music. (I hope you will have more luck opening the zyx site, neither my Firefox, nor my Opera could load this site…it just keeps loading and loading without showing anything. And if you disable JavaScript you get a site telling you that you should acctivate it :-/ ]
[second edit: you can also read an interwiew with Ola here.]