Staff Benda Bilili - Tres Tres Fort
2009

Staff Benda Bilili -- look beyond appearances.
Crammed records, which brought us the Congotronics series, do it again with African street music at its best.

Brought to you by TQMP
The Quality Music Project

For the past year, I've been emailing friends with links to Staff Benda Bilili clips on YouTube. Most members of the band are disabled – paraplegic victims of the polio virus – and homeless, living around the area near Kinshasa zoo. The YouTube clips present them in a bewitching light. Their wheelchairs are huge contraptions that look as if they are made from cast-off sections of Harley-Davidsons, and the group are heard harmonising old-time Congolese rumbas to a backdrop of handclapping and guitars. But the moment that gets everyone is during the song "Na Lingui Yo", when a street kid called Roger launches into a blistering solo on his homemade one-string lute, and a teenage girl sits alongside him and dissolves into a smile. Really, there is nothing so heartening.

We are all going to buy this wonderful record, we are going to share it with our friends, and – hey presto – we will have the Buena Vista Social Club of the brave new Obama age. For Tres Tres Fort is a gem – dreamy, joyful and full of delicious melodies. Its music is nostalgic for the classic years of Franco and OK Jazz with its Cuban-inspired call-and-response harmonies and lilting African rhythm guitar, yet it's been reinvented with gorgeously fresh songwriting. Check out the insistently catchy guitar licks of "Je t'aime" (aka "Na Lingui Yo"), or the vocal harmonies of "'Sala Keba" or "Mwana", and you will find the melodies ringing in your head for days. The production by Vincent Kenis (who also brought us Konono No 1) is a triumph: many of the songs were recorded out in the open, in the zoo grounds, seducing us with the sounds of Kinshasa offstage.

So there you have it: Album of the Year – signed, sealed and delivered.
--- SongLines

Tracks
01- Moto Moindo
02- Polio
03- Je T'aime
04- Sala Keba
05- Moziki
06- Sala Mosala
07- Avramandole
08- Tonkara
09- Marguerite
10- Staff Benda Bilili
11- Mwana

Artwork, EAC log and CUE sheet included

Format: FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) 
http://flac.sourceforge.net/index.html 

Enjoy, seed and inhale!

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