Number One Bus

Dressed in griot-chic and wielding his gimbri like a Fender Stratocaster, Nuru Kane comes on like a trans-Saharan cross between Bo Diddley and Jimi Hendrix. As with Hendrix, London looms large in Kane's story: it's a place where the Dakar-born singer was once a regular on the ‘number one bus from Bermondsey’. It's all there in the title-track: that stentorian baritone – think a Senegalese Seu Jorge – rattles off London boroughs and ‘camel dance’ characters in words somewhere between Wolof and English, set to a hard-bitten, Gnawa-Baye Fall blues. After the stuttering funk of ‘Love’, it begins to feel like a long-haul departure from Kane's acclaimed debut, Sigil, of 2006. As the album continues, the acoustic lineage becomes clearer: it's been expanded with dobro, lap-steel and a raft of percussion into a supple, pan-Africanism. There may be wildly contrasting arrangements but it's grounded, at its best, in the palm-smacking metronome of Maghrebi Gnawa. While ‘C'est ça’ pays frantic homage to Algeria, ‘Samaxol’ is arguably Kane's most ingenious blast of Afro-trance to date, a spitfire rhythm with a doo-wop undercarriage. Yet as many stylistic borders as it crosses, the final destination of Number One Bus is uncertain. He steers away from the desiccated blues of opener ‘Poulo’ into sawing Afro-Celt/Gallicisms and a cinematic twang on ‘Bobo’, ‘Maman’ and the closer ‘Salam’ – all of which have intimations of the damper landscapes of Kane's current home in the wilds of the Auvergne.