Various: African Acoustic and Reggae Meets Africa

By GRAHAM REID

African Acoustic (Herald rating: * * * *)

Reggae Meets Africa (Herald rating: * *)

By avoiding — or not having access to — the obvious names like South Africa's Lucky Dube the first of these paired collections of largely Francophone artists shines a light on the intersection of reggae rhythms, African instruments and some soaring, biting voices out of West Africa. However, as with many Pacific reggae artists there is a tendency, often driven by economics, toward synths and programming, so there's a bit less soul here than you might imagine.

Ismael Isaac's Terrorisme, for example, could come from one of our near neighbours, aside from the language. Some nice pop-reggae stuff, but nothing special or deep and rootsy as you might expect.Better is African Acoustic which features some names know to Womadists, such as Senegal's Ismael Lo and Mansour Seck.

These earthy, often heartaching tunes sound woven out of the desert sands and ride on waves of warm, snake-like guitar lines. The definition of "acoustic" is stretched to include electric guitars, but little here assaults the ears and most of the tracks seduce through subtlety, particularly like the gentle bounce of Sekouba Bambino's Na Soumbou and the folksy Mulopo by Tshala Muana.

Label: both King