Fatoumata Diawara calls for shared global heritage, plus this week’s best albums
Fatoumata Diawara, Maliba, ★★★★☆
With ever greater horrors hitting our screens every day, it feels tasteless even to start to think about the damage to Ukraine’s cultural heritage, let alone speculate on how it may one day be salvaged and restored. Yet experience suggests that the moment for such things could be coming sooner than we imagine. Indeed, who would have thought in 2012 – when Al Qaeda-linked rebels were running amok in the West African state of Mali, butchering all who stood in their way and destroying ancient shrines and monuments – that just a decade on, the saving of one of the country’s great cultural treasures, an ancient library in the fabled city of Timbuktu, would be celebrated in an album of bright and breezy neo-traditional pop sponsored by the makers of the world’s best known Internet search engine.
The charismatic Malian singer and actress Fatoumata Diawara becomes the voice and face of Google’s Arts and Culture platform with this digital-only album designed as the soundtrack to Mali Magic & Timbuktu Manuscripts, an online showcase for the vast collections of irreplaceable documents preserved in the ancient Saharan metropolis.
If the choice of Mali as the focus for such an ambitious project reflects the country’s standing as one of Africa’s great cultural and historical centres – the Timbuktu manuscripts include medieval translations of Plato and 17th-century treatises on astronomy and the ethics of slavery – there’s nothing remotely purist or academic in Diawara’s ringing, declamatory tones and jangling, propulsive electric-guitar backing.
The twice Grammy-nominated Diawara’s vocal style is derived from traditional “advice songs” that offer moral counsel to the listener, hence her knowing, slightly sing-song intonation: if it’s possible to hector and bray sublimely gracefully, that’s what she does. Yet there’s an exhilarating modernity to the vocal arrangements on the opener Ana Ka Bin, with Diawara’s light, bright tones twisting away from the main melody against a delightful skittering guitar riff.
One Day, a call to the Malian people to understand the significance of their cultural treasures, with its yearning melody and surging strings, all romantically redolent of epic desert vistas, makes the kind of inspirational appeal to the higher instincts that made Youssou N’Dour and Neneh Cherry’s Seven Seconds a huge Afro-crossover hit in the mid-Nineties. You’ll get the feel even if you don’t understand a word, though the lack of a catchy English-language chorus – à la Seven Seconds – will probably prevent it from seriously denting the charts.
The deliciously loose, slightly lopsided groove of the closer Yakandi, with beautiful, tingling open-toned guitar-picking by Yacouba Kone and a rousing intervention from Malian rapper Master Soumy, will have your head nodding and spine twisting in sympathy whether you like it or not. While Diawara’s music is rooted in the hunters’ rhythms of her ancestral Wassoulou region of Mali, she paid her dues as an actress in fringe theatre in France, before turning to singing full-time, and projects herself not as a traditional singer, as you might expect, but as a stylish, if idiosyncratic woman of the world.
Where African music aimed at an international audience has often felt awkward in its collisions of Western technology and local instrumentation, this album’s mixture of the traditional and the modern feels entirely at ease in its own skin – super-sharp in its production values, yet completely confident in its sense of roots and identity.
The fact that Diawara hails not from Timbuktu, but from the remote south of Mali, lives in France and the album was at least partly recorded in Spain, is beside the point. She wants us to embrace the idea of a genuinely global shared heritage – an idea that couldn’t be more relevant at the moment – where we can all celebrate the “tolerant and humanist” Islam that apparently existed in ancient Timbuktu. That this is happening under the aegis of one of the genuine global super powers of our time, a giant tech company, is all part of the package. Mark Hudson
The Mysterines, Reeling ★★★☆☆
I knew I was going to like The Mysterines before I had even heard a note. It’s the name for one thing. It is so hard to come up with a crunchy, punchy, definite article classic garage band name in a modern age when it seems every possible combination of nouns, verbs and misspellings has been registered by an untold number of musical outfits in nearly 70 years of rock’n’roll, lingering in a streaming twilight where trademarks never die. But ladies and gentlemen, here are The Mysterines, who look and sound exactly the way a band called the Mysterines should: a skinny Liverpool quartet of moody youths dressed in black, playing a set of amped up, guitar fuzzing, drum thundering, breathless belters as if they had invented the three-chord trick themselves.
A Liverpool band barely out of their teens, their point of focus is guitar-slinging frontwoman Lia Metcalfe, whose voice is low and sneery enough to lend a distinctive flavour to generic chord changes and overused riffs. The Mysterines' default setting is fast and furious garage punk-rock to which Metcalfe adds a goth grandeur with doomy lyrics and a quality of brazen glee at the rebellious posturing of songs with statement titles such as Life’s A Bitch (But I Like It So Much), Dangerous, On The Run and Old Friends Die Hard.
Producer Catherine Marks has worked with PJ Harvey and Wolf Alice, and while The Mysterines are not yet deserving of comparison to such adventurous artists, Marks brings clarity, separation and dynamic drive to their straight-down-the-line arrangements, with just enough variety in Metcalfe and Callum Thompson’s guitar tones to keep ears pricked up.
The second half of the album allows the band to open up from their basic template, with the sensual stomp of Under Your Skin, the twisted blues of The Bad Thing, the spiraling proto-metal of Means to Bleed, jagged acoustic balladry of Still Call You Home and moodily absurd goth cabaret of album closer The Confession Song. There’s nothing on here we haven’t heard a zillion times before but that doesn’t mean it's not a pleasure to hear it being done again, with the energy and passion of a young band discovering the thrill of full tilt rock and roll with amps turned up to 11. Some things never get old. Neil McCormick
Ego Ella May, Fieldnotes Pt II ★★★★★
South London singer-songwriter Ego Ella May could seize your heart with the sweetest whisper. There’s a tender allure and potent insistence to her melodies, as demonstrated by her acclaimed 2020 debut album Honey For Wounds (which earned her a MOBO Award for Best Jazz Act, and was released on John Boyega’s record label).
Last year’s initial Fieldnotes EP emerged as soulful meditations from the lockdown era. Fieldnotes Pt II feels attuned to Ego Ella May’s increasingly broad fanbase, and charts a love affair as it unfurls, blossoms and fades over five beautifully moving tracks.
The spirit-lifting shimmer of Beautiful Days evokes the promise of a dreamy, sun-kissed summer. Ego Ella May’s sound brings to mind transatlantic elements and eras, including 1970s psych-soul and the 1990s neo soul surge (her wry, slinky observations are sometimes reminiscent of the glorious Erykah Badu), but she also delivers a distinctly contemporary British tone.
She co-produces these tracks with talented peers including Blue Lab Beats and LVTHER, and the instrumentation flows assuredly throughout, from the irresistible groove of Introvert Hotline (“don’t call me”) to the blissed-out serenade of Centred. Solitude and introspection have been recurring themes in her songs, yet here they succumb to new possibilities, and make the listener feel like a trusted confidant.
The fleeting Why? is both a turning-point and a soothing comedown based on a mesmerising, and entirely relatable refrain (“Why do I seem to make the same mistakes/ Thinking you could care for me?”). Ego Ella May’s break-up story is heartfelt yet refreshingly free of bitterness, and For The Both Of Us is a sublime end-note to a wonderful collection. She makes peace with past lives; she projects radiantly towards the next adventure. Arwa Haider
Rex Orange County, Who Cares? ★★★☆☆
Coming at you straight out of Surrey rather than the Californian locale suggested by his moniker, Rex Orange County is one of the few British contemporary artists who can claim to be bigger in the US than he is here at home. Collaborations with artily maverick Los Angeles rapper Tyler, the Creator helped quirky songsmith Alex O’Connor locate a loyal audience for his own intimate and yet fundamentally old-fashioned material. His third album, Pony, went top three in the US charts in 2019 (it was number 5 in the UK), and he can sell out venues of the scale of Red Rocks Amphitheatre and the Hollywood Bowl. Yet there is nothing very obviously contemporary or commercial about him. O’Connor blends rhythmically up-tempo piano with lush orchestrations over jazzily adventurous chord sequences with just a hint of hip hop beats lending the faintest of modern touches to distinguish him from the kind of thing being done by, say, Randy Newman or Harry Nilsson (or, less exotically, Gilbert O’Sullivan) in the Seventies.
O’Connor doesn’t have the lyrical wit of such exalted forbears, however, preferring to concoct chattily rambling excursions through his inner world, as if communing with close friends. On paper, his lyrics don’t look like much. One sketchy new song, Making Time, circles repeatedly around the phrase “Don’t wait up, I’m OK, I’m OK” with not much more content than a hastily scribbled Haiku, whilst another titled Worth It resembles something tapped into a phone during a bout of insomnia: “I feel insane / And I’m not sure / Why things changed / What’s worth it anymore / Am I not the same / Now I’m not sure / If I’m to blame.”
Fortunately, O’Connor has a gift for easy flowing melodies which he sings in an affectless downbeat croon, his emotional inflection never changing much whether he’s expressing alienation or elation, the two poles between which his concerns vacillate. Fourth album Who Cares? finds the hyper-sensitive singer-songwriter addressing anxiety and depression (Open a Window, 7 AM), expressing romantic adoration (Amazing, One In a Million) whilst fretting about his neediness (If You Want It, The Shade) and fear of hurt (Shoot Me Down). His songs often sound like pep talks for himself. Opening track, Keep It Up, alternates between fretful verses (“I guess, it’s stress / It’s making me feel so depressed”) and encouraging choruses (“Keep it up and go on / You’re only holding out for what you want”), although there is disconcertingly little differentiation in delivery throughout. He throws swear words into songs without discernible impact, fitting so many syllables into “f*** this” on Open a Window that he sounds less like an angry young man than a cocktail lounge jazz crooner disillusioned with his easy listening set.
Perhaps it is this deliberately understated tone that strikes a chord with his young fans, recasting the sophistication of his song structures into something that sounds almost as if it is being made up on the spot. O’Connor’s way with a melody is distinctive and his arrangements have depth and texture, avoiding the kind obvious pop constructions you hear from Britain’s most successful songwriting export, the sainted Ed Sheeran. He is beating his own idiosyncratic path and catching the ear of an audience charmed by his touchy-feely candour about his personal wellbeing. Yet who would have imagined profound struggles with mental and emotional health could sound this bland? There are some unfortunate implications in that shrug of an album title that tempts an equally dismissive response. Who Cares? Not this listener, I’m afraid. Neil McCormick