Consumer Guide Album

The Lijadu Sisters: Mother Africa [Knitting Factory, 2012]
There was apparently a Shanachie best-of I never heard back in '84, but in this heyday of obscurantist crate-digging, now the entire four-album catalogue of these beauteous second cousins of Fela and Wole Soyinka will be released over a one-year span. The debut was Danger and it's lame, English-language moralism further weakening wan attempts at the pop equanimity the Shirelles and lesser females achieved so sweetly so long before. On this follow-up, though, the sustaining grooves the title half-promises buoy gentle soprano harmonies attached to messages I know enough not to be curious about. Instead there are the thrumming pressure drums, the clarinet obbligato that could be a soprano sax obbligato, the guitar solo that could be a synth solo, the spoken praise of the moon delivered by multi-instrumental mastermind Biddy Wright. All of which, I suspect, could be readily accommodated by a new best-of that also isolated a keeper on Danger itself. B+