Neil Spencer 

Cheikh Lô: Balbalou review – back on form with a sleek and sultry set

The Senegalese singer returns to top form with a lushly produced, strong new album
  
  

Cheikh Lo
‘A peace warrior on a mission’: Cheikh Lô. Photograph: PR

The Senegalese singer’s star has waned since his startling arrival a decade ago, but this lavishly produced fifth album finds him back on form. Recorded in Sweden and Paris, it’s packed with sleek mbalax grooves, mixing funk horns and talking drums, and fronted by Lô’s sweet, dancing vocals, at times falsetto, at others husky. There’s a lovely cross-Atlantic fusion on Degg Gui, with Brazilian chanteuse Flavia Coelho, a duet with Mali’s Oumou Sangaré, and a sultry title track threaded with the Miles-like trumpet of Ibrahim Maalouf. A follower of Baye Fall, a mystic Islamic sect, Lô is a peace warrior on a mission, the light to Boko Haram’s darkness, as Baissons les Armes suggests.

 

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