(Moshi Moshi/Shock)

AKA Esau Mwamwaya &The Mothers Of Disappointment

The Very Best are in an unenviable position right now. Having released possibly the most successful viral mixtape of last year, Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit Are The Very Best, expectations are high for their début album proper, Warm Heart Of Africa. At the same time, these expectations are bound to be disappointed in some way, no matter what. One way to put the problem is this: EMRVB was not only a mission statement and program for the group’s future studio work, as all mixtapes are. It also satisfyingly played the familiar (Architecture In Helsinki riddims, two M.I.A. tracks, a fucking Beatles cover) against the unfamiliar, namely, Mwamwaya’s transcendentally good voice. But now that The Very Best have moved beyond cribbing other people’s work, that satisfying interplay of the comfortable and the new is all but gone (Kamphopo, the AIH-sampling opener of EMRVB, remains, beefed up with a new intro). Now the closest thing to comfortable is the group’s tongue-in-cheek (I hope) Lion-King-isms, evident on Warm Heart Of Africa’s opener, Yalira. The abundance of steel drums and African choirs on this album indicates that The Very Best have taken the easier road of playing with what Westerners expect from African music. As such, when this album shines is also when the average Western listener is without a compass, as in the Mwamwaya-focused tracks Nsokoto and Ntende Uli. These tracks more than make up for the unnecessary appearance of Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig in the title track, but they don’t quite make Warm Heart Of Africa this decade’s Graceland.

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CHAD PARKHILL

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