African Acoustic

A few years back Songlines used to be deluged with multi-artist budget-priced compilations like this one. Indeed, there were so many of them that they came to resemble a plague – and this reviewer has to plead guilty to having compiled some of them. Since then the bottom has dropped out of the comp market, overtaken by Spotify playlists and the like. Most of the record companies involved seem to have disappeared but Dan Storper’s Putamayo, who were the pioneers in the field, are still going – and collections like African Acoustic make one rather glad that they have stuck with it. We get ten diverse contemporary singer-songwriters from the African continent, some familiar and some less known, but it all hangs together as a splendidly coherent listening experience as all the best mixtapes should. Longstanding SL favourites here include Guinea Bissau’s Kimi Djabaté and South Africa’s Louis Mhlanga. New names (at least to this reviewer) include a pair of impressive singers from Burkina Faso in the haunting bluesman Salif Diarra and the smoky-voiced Moussa Koita, Madagascar’s Mikahely and the Canadian-based Kenyan songbird KeruBo. All leave you wanting to investigate and hear more – which, of course, is the principal raison d’être for compilations such as this.