Stop the Hate

Femi Kuti's last album, 2018's One People One World, was disappointing; it lacked the bite of earlier recordings and sounded as if he was going through the motions. Then last year he popped up playing saxophone on Coldplay's Everyday Life and you wondered if he had grown tired of carrying the Afrobeat mantle of his legendary father Fela. Happily, here Kuti seems to have relocated his mojo, perhaps re-energised by the increasingly influential presence in his band of son Made, who contributes bass, alto sax and percussion.

With the Afrobeat rhythms simmering and burning as fiercely as they did on early classic albums such as 1998's Shoki Shoki, there's a propulsive urgency to Femi's vocals and his own sax playing has never sounded mightier. On ‘Pà Pá Pà’ he rails against Nigeria's corrupt politicians who ‘waste our life’. The jazzy ‘As We Struggle Everyday’ with its call-and-response vocals seems to carry a wider message of solidarity in these days of Black Lives Matter. The title-track is another standout, driven by a busily inventive drum pattern of which Tony Allen would have been proud, while the closer ‘Set Your Minds and Souls Free’ is a hypnotic, high-octane Afrobeat epic that evokes Fela in his heyday.