Riots in the Jungle

Skip & Die are an enigmatic creative duo who've made a debut album that could and should be reviewed by dance, club, world and leftfield music mags. Their muses may well be Manu Chao, MIA and the Baile Funk massive, but they take these obsessions on a trip around vocalist Catarina Aimée Dahms’ South African homeland. There they join forces with Cape Flats hip-hop combo Driemanskap, Soweto's Season Marimba Stars and Cape Town's Gazelle to deliver a set of songs that make you move and think. Underpinning it all is the stunningly potent work of producer Jori Collignon from the Netherlands, the other member of the duo. You can bask and writhe in his fluency, which extends right across the patois patchwork of dance floor rhythms, from dubstep, cumbia and reggae to bhangra. He's also an adept at inventive soundscapes and you get a sense that all the performances are transmuted by his masterly presence at the controls. Dahms’ sly, sexy, savvy multilingual vocalisms and agitprop lyrics keep the pot on the boil and light up the whole album. You're never quite sure who is the Batman in their dynamic duo.

Ten of the 12 tracks really hit the spot, notably ‘Killing Aid’ with Gazelle, ‘To Skip & Die in SA’ with Season Marimba Stars and the klezmer-flavoured head-banger ‘Love Jihad. Personally I’d bury the first and last tracks, ‘Jungle Riot’ and ‘Tigresito’, somewhere mid-album. But who, apart from critics, listens to whole CDs in their original sequence these days anyway?