Reviews

With 'Millions', French band Dub Inc presents its seventh album, a successor to 2016's 'So What' and one of the most impressive releases in their more than twenty-year career!

Some twenty-five years after the release of his debut album 'Muso Ko' and five years after predecessor 'Soô', Malian bard Habib Koite returns with 'Kharifa'. Over the years Koite's sound has become much more refined, but the formula has hardly been tampered with.

Exactly five years after 'Easy To Love', reggae crooner Maxi Priest returns with 'It All Comes Back To Love', for which this time he handed the reins to his buddy and colleague Shaggy.

'Chaos Theories', the new album by Canadian band The Souljazz Orchestra, turns out to be the logical sequel to its 2017 predecessor 'Under Burning Skies', which was strongly influenced by music from the nineteen eighties.

With a musical career spanning more than 5 decades, Clinton Fearon has nothing left to prove. Still, the Jamaican veteran spent more time than usual on 'History Say'.

The story behind 'Amadjar' (Tamasheq for "unknown visitor") started in October of 2018 at the Taragalte Festival for nomadic cultures in the Moroccan Sahara. After their set at the festival, the members of Tinariwen immediately drove on to Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania, an almost two week journey. Every evening the caravan halted somewhere and under the beautiful starry sky the various musicians started to work on the foundations of this long-player.

With 'Flying Island', the Universal Egg label is finally presenting an album release by another artist than Zion Train themselves again. Jungle Weed aka Dub Trotter, is the alter ego of Jules Deville, a dub producer and globetrotter from Toulouse in the south of France.

Even though we've become quite familiar with the American reggae scene, this 'World On Fire', already Stick Figure's seventh album, is our first introduction to this singer-songwriter from Duxbury in Massachusetts, who has been operating from San Diego in California for a long time now, and is extremely popular in his own country.

Some albums are so iconic that they need little introduction. Take 'Pata Pata' for example, the international breakthrough album of Mama Africa Miriam Makeba, originally released in 1966 on the American Reprise Records label, for which she was assisted by Harry Bellafonte, and which over the years has been re-released numerous times.

Yours truly got to know Moroccan revelation Oum, born Oum el Ghaït Benessahraoui, in 2015 thanks to 'Zarabi', her second album. On successor 'Daba', the singer proves she has clearly matured and takes her mix of Arab and Berber influences with elements from soul and jazz to the next level.