Prodigious guitar skills have always been at the core of Nigerien artist Mdou Moctar‘s outrageously dextrous rock music, a blazing take on the Saharan tishoumaren style associated with artists like Tinariwen and Bombino. On Funeral for Justice, Moctar and his band make music notable both for what it demonstrates of his creative palette and for its unyielding anti-colonial politics. These aspects are wholly inextricable as they drive Moctar and his group forward in making perhaps the most vital a

In 1982, members of the Rohingya ethnic group, located primarily in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State, lost their rights to natal citizenship en masse with the ratification of a law that pointedly refused to recognize their claims to indigenous status. Instead, the 1982 Citizenship Law bolstered the Burmese government’s ongoing narrative of the Rohingya as colonial-era interlopers from Bangladesh, paving the way for nothing short of genocide. Acts of ethnic cleansing reached a fever pitch in 2017,

There’s no weak entry in the Ibibio Sound Machine discography, and Pull the Rope is no exception. The London-based collective continue experimenting with different permutations of highlife, electropop, and funk on their fifth full-length release, making the most of every moment. This album, in particular, stands out, for the most part, as an exceptionally seamless blend of everything they do well, brass meeting beats and sending sparks flying. As is often the case in Ibibio Sound Machine’s work,

Berlin may be Jembaa Groove’s home base, but listening to the group’s smooth blend of highlife and jazz on their second album, Ye Ankasa | We Ourselves, makes it clear that they carry with them much broader senses of place and personhood. Band leader Eric Owusu and multi-instrumentalist Kwame Yeboah grew up together in Accra; Yeboah is now based in London. Like Owusu and Yeboah, Cuban-born trumpeter Daniel Allen Oberto has played with late Nigerian legend Tony Allen. The intercontinental connect

Vintage vibes abound in Mirantes Emocionais, the latest album from young Belo-Horizontino composer Arthur Melo, but the heart of it, as its title (“emotional viewpoints”) suggests, is much more about conveying strong sentiments than simple retrophilia. Certainly, the sounds of 1960s bossa nova, 1970s psych rock and tropicália, and even a little 1980s post-punk are key to that; Melo harnesses nostalgia in powerful ways. Still, it seems a mistake to reduce Mirantes Emocionais to a rehashing of the