1000 Can Die

It’s as absurd to generalise about African albums as it would be American or European albums. But over the years there’s definitely been a plethora of tasteful recordings tailor-made for a particular kind of world music audience. It’s therefore exciting when occasionally an African album (from Ghana in this instance) bucks the trend and is almost shocking in its edgy, confrontational insistence.

Producer Zea (aka Arnold de Boer of the Dutch post-punk band The Ex) does a masterly job of subtly integrating hip-hop bottom-end and electronica atmospherics that never sound shoehorned in. There’s some great guests too: Orlando Julius’ counter-intuitively relaxed sax on the galloping ‘Dapagara’; and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry doing his ‘elder statesman of dub’ routine on the title-track, rambling on about Queen Elizabeth while flute, buzzing bass synth and hand drums thunder away in the foreground. But the star is King Ayisoba himself, who makes one think of an unholy mix of Tom Waits at his most wilfully noisy and Busta Rhymes being, well, Busta Rhymes. ‘One day we’ll bury the ghosts from the past,’ sings producer Zea on the wall of tribal noise that is ‘Wekana’. They are half-way there already.