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Baaba Maal explores new frontiers, The Zombies share a lifetime’s wisdom – the week’s best albums

Sonic assault: Baaba Maal updates his sound in Being
Sonic assault: Baaba Maal updates his sound in Being

Baaba Maal, Being ★★★★☆

Over a 40-year career, Senegalese musician Baaba Maal has become a towering figure in world music. The son of a fisherman, Maal grew up in Podor in the country’s far north and was expected to follow his father’s career path. He didn’t, instead studying music in Dakar and, later, at the Beaux-Arts school in Paris. Maal has released over a dozen albums, fusing traditional African and Western sounds and working with producers including Brian Eno. His last album, 2016’s The Traveller, was a fairly mellow and meditative affair, as was his collaboration with London folkies Mumford & Sons on their Johannesburg EP the same year. His new album, Being, is a different beast altogether.

Its seven tracks are percussive and urgent, melding traditional rhythms and trance-like chants with intense electronic arrangements. Produced by Johan Karlberg, who was recently behind Self Esteem’s much-lauded Prioritise Pleasure album, Being gives the 69-year-old’s music a more modern and claustrophobic edge. This is by some stretch the most contemporary-sounding album of Maal’s career.

The album is sung primarily in Pulaar, Maal’s native tongue, but there’s some Wolof too (the national language of Senegal), with lyrics about the impact of technology on modern life and how new generations of Africans can make themselves heard in an increasingly noisy world. But you don’t need to be Pulaar or Wolof speakers to understand the album’s pulse and messaging. The music does it for you: the urgency of the sounds – and the juxtaposition of traditional plucked instruments with modern programmed ones – conveys this sense of old and new colliding.

The beats pound. I wouldn’t be the first listener to notice how similar in sound the Senegalese sabar drums on opening track Yerimayo Celebration are to massed Indian dhol drums. The song is a pulverising thrill, with the percussion its driving force. The track Freak Out, featuring Karlberg’s band The Very Best, starts with heavily distorted vocals before it segues into a mid-tempo stomp, complete with snippets of buckled bass and leftfield atmospherics. It’s music that would be deemed adventurously contemporary even if it was released by someone half Maal’s age. It’s not all in-your-face percussion and chart-friendly modernism. Maal’s vocals have a soothing quality, particularly on songs such as Casamance Nights. At eight minutes long, this percussion-free track closes the album. Its reflective ambience comes as something of a tonic after what’s gone before.

Maal has updated his sound just as the spheres of world music and pop music seem to have been converging in ever-closer alignment. Beyoncé’s Renaissance album from last year had clear afrobeat influences, particularly on tracks like Move, which featured Nigerian singer Tems as a guest. Also in 2022, Nigerian ‘Afro-fusion’ star Burna Boy collaborated with Ed Sheeran.

Maal’s personal influence seems to be spreading too – and about time. He recently provided the voice of Wakanda on the soundtrack for Afrofuturism blockbusters Black Panther and Wakanda Forever, working with the soundtrack producer by taking him around Senegal to find musicians. A renowned polymath at home – Maal’s studio in Dakar is a hub for artists, musicians, designers, environmentalists and students – he is now becoming better known elsewhere too.

Being, then, is something of a sonic assault. People who liked The Traveller may feel – justifiably – that melody plays second fiddle to rhythm here. This certainly isn’t music to woozily veg out to on the Sunday morning of WOMAD. This is stand-up-and-listen music, commanding attention in surprising ways. Being suggests that far from mellowing with age, Maal – who turns 70 in June – remains as eager and excited to explore new frontiers as he ever was. James Hall

Pretty super: Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus of American indie rock band Boygenius - Harrison Whitford
Pretty super: Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus of American indie rock band Boygenius - Harrison Whitford

Boygenius, The Record ★★★★☆

Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus are amongst the most singular American singer-songwriters of their generation (Z, to give it its alphabetical designation), twentysomethings marked both by ironic post-modern hyperawareness and intensely navel gazing self-absorption.

The cover of their 2018 debut self-titled collaborative EP depicted the trio in a cheery pastiche of Crosby, Stills & Nash, one of the original so-called “supergroups” of the Sixties. It’s a concept that hangs amusingly around Boygenius. There is such a self-deprecating, indie aspect to their solo careers that the “super” part of the equation rings with winking irony, a notion as playful as three assertive female songwriters collaborating under a misgendered band name. Besides which, though all have devoted followings, only Bridgers has really crossed over towards mainstream recognition. This is more akin to a songwriter’s round circle, fellow travellers sharing studio space.

Their debut long player offers a selection of very finely honed songs about love and friendship, studded with fantastic and consistently delightful lyrical details (“Once I took your medication to know what it’s like / And now I have to act like I can’t read your mind”) and performed with joyous energy and a spirit of pleasing simpatico reflected in lovely harmonies and surprising arrangements.

On most songs one writer takes a distinctive lead role, Dacus offering tenderly ruminative narratives on We’re In Love and True Blue, Bridgers expertly switching emotional gears on Emily I’m Sorry and Letter to an Old Poet, and Baker injecting indie rock spit and humour into $20 and Anti-Curse. On others, they swap positions and perspectives, whether offering alternate takes on meetings with ex-lovers on Cool About It or testing the limits of bravado on Not Strong Enough and Satanist.

There is, perhaps, a sense that the production is more of an afterthought than core to the project. The album sounds like something knocked out almost live in a spirit of excitement, rather than with objective vision or commercial muscle. I’d be hard pressed to assert that this (unlike CS&N) amounts to more than the sum of its parts, rather than a celebration of great parts. But it is impossible to argue that as a group, Boygenius are pretty super. Neil McCormick

Max Jury, Avenues ★★★★☆

“Welcome to the real world,” Max Jury gently croons on the opening track of his third album, Avenues. “Step inside its getting kind of cold.” Delivered with mellifluous melodiousness and topped by a sweet high harmony, its a very tempting offer, albeit I'm not entirely convinced the 30-year-old American singer-songwriter actually lives in the real world.

Jury's music practically sighs with rose-tinted nostalgia for a lost era of California songcraft, for plush soft rocking arrangements of gently strummed acoustic guitars, sonorous piano and analogue arrangements that tickle and tease with tasteful licks and tender touches. Jury is clearly a devotee of such elegantly intelligent  songwriters as Jackson Browne, Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell with a thread of the country inflections of Guy Clark and John Prine. Apart from an incongruous reference to “a driverless car” in the blissful Happiness To Myself, this really rather gorgeous album could have been a lost classic from the 70s, rediscovered whilst crate digging in a yard sale in Laurel Canyon.

A native of Des Moines, Iowa, Jury dropped out of a scholarship at Boston’s renowned Berklee College of Music and somehow washed up on Britain's shores six years ago. Jury was briefly touted as the next great singer-songwriter, admired by Lana Del Rey and Rufus Wainwright, but the music world seems to have passed him by. It might explain the bittersweet between-words quality of his songs, full of unfulfilled romantic yearning of a man out of time and place. “All along the way I was in a dream,” he sighs in All Along the Way, but doesn't convince that he's actually woken up yet.

There’s more than a hint of the late, great Gram Parsons in Jury’s careworn romanticism, a scruffy quality that contrasts hangdog mournfulness with the joy innate in the music itself, a seamless blend of Americana with southern gospel and soul. “I got love for everybody/ Maybe they got love for me” he offers hopefully on Feel Free, with a chorus that sounds like he's roped in the Eagles to back him up. This may not be 21st century pop music to rock the modern digital world but if you like songs perfectly formed, beautifully played, delicately harmonised and containing piercing nuggets of love and pain, well, Jury hits a very sweet spot. Neil McCormick

Youthful ambitions fulfilled: The Zombies - ALEX LAKE
Youthful ambitions fulfilled: The Zombies - ALEX LAKE

The Zombies, Different Game ★★★★☆

These late-1960s British rock legends had famously split up in malnourished disillusion before their second album, Odessey & Oracle, could be released (the sleeve artist even misspelled its title), only for final track Time of the Season to become a Transatlantic smash and the album to be acknowledged as a psychedelic masterpiece.

Core duo Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent each went on to enjoy solo success with their sophisticated, profoundly musician-ly take on pop songcraft, but from the mid-’00s onwards reconvened for Odessey victory laps.

Following 2015’s purposefully entitled Still Got That Hunger, this second Zombies album of the new lifespan displays vocal powerhouse Blunstone and master keysman Argent’s robust technical abilities as entirely undiminished, and of staggering breadth.

Stylistically, Different Game runs an extraordinary gamut, at one point flipping in a heartbeat from I Want To Fly’s consummate chamber-pop, composed only of elaborate classical strings and voice, to Got To Move On’s driving, Spencer Davis Group-style R&B.

The title track opens the record like a doppelgänger of Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale, all funereal beat and mournful organ, before branching out into sumptuous orchestration (Q Strings deserve a gold medal here) and acrobatic voicing of later-life worries and bitterness.

On the emotive, piano-led You Could Be My Love, 77-year-old Blunstone might almost be out to usurp Queen Belter, Adele, but this album certainly isn’t for the youth market. Mostly penned by gnarly veteran Argent, its lyrics pack in a lifetime’s wisdom and woes. “How can you love if you’ve never tasted tears?” runs a world-weary line in mutedly optimistic acoustic finale, The Sun Will Rise Again.

Different Game shamelessly, brilliantly harks back to the prog-rock era, where compositional excellence and instrumental virtuosity brought new possibilities to the pop song. More than half a century later, those youthful ambitions are herein fulfilled, in 10 tracks of maturity and majesty. Andrew Perry

Davido, Timeless ★★★★☆

Eleven years into a well-burnished career, pioneering Afrobeats star David Adedeji Adeleke, aka Davido, finds himself in a reflective mood. Timeless, the Atlanta-born, Lagos-raised singer’s fourth solo album, follows the unbridled optimism of 2019’s A Good Time and the following year’s A Better Time, and sees the singer take a punt at making a career-defining album. But Timeless is more revue than review, offering a survey not just of Davido’s own indelible mark on Nigerian pop music, but of African music’s global contributions as a whole. It’s the kind of grandiose statement that Davido, never one for shyness, has built his career on – and he’s among the few who can convincingly carry it off.

He assembles an ensemble cast for his task, pulling in legends like Angélique Kidjo (for a highlife assist alongside The Cavemen on Na Money), contemporary rappers (Dexta Daps drops a tight verse on Bop; Skepta flexes on U (Juju)), and introducing fresher faces, including distinctive singers Morravey and Fave, to his orbit.

But when it comes to writing a classic Afrobeats hook, Davido remains in need of little assistance: E Pain Me or the sax-flexing Over Dem both offer the distinct combination of slink and snap that have marked out the genre as a world-beater. He transposes this familiar flow to the pacier thrum of amapiano on Precision, retaining his punctilious broken syllables and enunciating “en-er-jee” with all the thump of a cruiserweight’s jab. These forays into the latest sound to blow out from the continent onto the global stage (Feel, Godfather, and closing highlight Champion Sound all feature amapiano’s signature log drum thunk too) suggest Davido is just as capable of moving with the times as reflecting on them.

In taking such a broad-brush approach, Davido runs the risk – in spite of his generally larger-than-life presence – of getting lost in the wash. He’s guilty, occasionally, of hitting the same notes, his lyrics are drawn from slim volumes (parties, girls, designer clothes), and there’s a sense that an editor’s scissors might have been employed a little more vigorously in places. But ultimately the magnetism of Davido’s character shines through, and his gold-flaked vocals still fizz and bubble. Further instalments in the series aren’t promised; “I’m not sure what comes after this,” he tweeted at the album’s arrival. Timeless, then, makes a convincing case – with just half an eye on the future – for living wholly in the moment. Will Pritchard