The problem with hearing so much music is it gets harder to be surprised. But this album defies all preconceptions and never settles into a genre that you could name and locate on the shelves or download menus.
From the minute it starts, there's an authority to the production, as if it knows what it's doing and where it's going. The sounds are well-recorded and neatly balanced, and, just as you start to realise that you don't understand the words and can't figure out which country the singer is from, you've reached track three and somebody is singing in English. Check the sleevenotes and you find it's Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend, singing impressively high and passionately on the title track, a duet. Quite what he and the other singer are saying is hard to ascertain. Are they celebrating the PLO?
Either way, having established that Warm Heart of Africa is no ordinary record, I go back to the opener, Yalira, and it becomes apparent that there are some words in English on this one, too, with references to Malawi and Bob Marley, but the nationality and style of the music remain unclear. The keyboard on track two (Chalo) plays triplets like on Supertramp's Dreamer, and the whole song has a retro 80s feel, harking back to Peter Gabriel and Salif Keita. All very impressive, but neither track feels like a proper song. That problem evaporates with the strong melody of the anthemic Warm Heart of Africa, though I'm still baffled by the reference to their "favourite PLO".
There's an impression of a band, with a lot of voices on several tracks, on this collaboration between the European production team Radioclit – who used to host a radio show on the internet and who refer to their sound as "ghetto-pop", combining as it does hip-hop and grime, along with myriad African dance styles – and the Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya. Improbably, they met in Esau's second-hand shop in east London's Clapton, where one-half of Radioclit, Frenchman Etienne Tron (his colleague Johan Karlberg is Swedish), had gone to buy a bike. They surrendered to fate and decided to work together.
Warm Heart of Africa is reported to have evolved out of a mixtape sent out to various tastemakers towards the end of last year, when it was listed in several top 10s. Encouraged, Radioclit decided to produce this 13-track album, which, after those first few more-or-less normal songs, switches gear into what could be classified as dance music, although it never surrenders to a cliched four-to-the-floor bass drum. Instead, a variety of backgrounds are laid down for Esau to sing over; often multi-tracked, these sound like the work of a vocal group. On Julia, a squeaky electronic keyboard wails away in the background, while MIA joins the fray on Rain Dance, chanting over a jungle drum track. A string quartet slow things down elegantly on Kada Manja until, finally, a multi-voice choir on Zam'dizko brings Warm Heart of Africa to a standstill. The more I listen, the better it gets, especially towards the end of the album.
The live clips of the Very Best on YouTube suggest an almost chaotic stage presence, and this very easy-on-the-ear debut may inspire many imitators.
