Forever is 4 You

This could just as well be by a Malawi Mouse Boy, rather than Boys, as the music is so minimalist on these very brief tracks. The presence of a chunky, organic bass sound was a crucial ingredient of their last album Dirt is Good (reviewed in #99), but it's now sadly absent on these very lo-fi sessions. In fact, there's barely more than a single thin-sounding guitar present on most of this third album's songs, the majority of group activities largely being restricted to vocals and percussion. There's nothing necessarily amiss with this, except that the general delivery is rickety in the extreme, with scraps of songs curtailed not for dynamic punch, but just simply because they’ve run out of energy and ideas. The performances on some of the songs are reasonable, but there are frequent diversions into pieces that feature shrieks, rattling, chanting and rodent impersonations, or amplified interior guitar bangs, with distorted vocal wasp-impersonations. These oddball strategies are certainly brave, only they end up sounding like messing around rather than inspired invention.

Towards the end, there are returns to the Malawi Mouse Boys’ familiar gospel a capella and mento-influenced styles. The best songs are ‘Ndiyenda Nkuunika’, with a scratchy guitar sound pushed up to the edge of quietened distortion, and ‘Ndili Ndi Nyumba’. But there's also ‘Ndatopa Nawe’, sounding as if its vocal melody and chord shapes are being worked out on the hoof, and ‘Kuthoza’, with irritating vocal wind-effects.