Ubiquity Us Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Headed up by Benin-born Kaleta - a guitarist who has previously worked with Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade and Lauryn Hill - Super Yamba Band is a New York collective whose decidedly psychedelic fusions of Afrobeat, Highlife and Afro-funk have been getting rave reviews. "Medaho" is their debut album and it more than lives up to the hype. With Kaleta's variously fuzzy, sun-kissed and flash-fried licks to the fore, the band trips its way through nine mostly dancefloor-friendly workouts that wrap heavy funk instrumentation, rousing horns and Afrobeat style organ riffs around polyrhythmic drums that recall the distinctive swing of Tony Allen. It's a stylistic blend that guarantees results, as the sheer volume of highlights triumphantly proves.

Review: Since taking up music production following a career-ending football injury, 20-something Leeds lad Reuben Vaun Smith has delivered two tropical-tinged, Balearic-inspired albums for Soundway. On his third full-length (his first for long-serving Californian label Ubiquity Records), the Yorkshireman refocuses a little more on the dancefloor, offering up a range of attractive cuts that combine his love of mid-tempo, dubbed-out disco with African, Latin and Middle Eastern vocals, rhythms and instrumentation - as well as a heavy dose of psychedelic sounds and trippy effects. It's a smart shift that's undoubtedly paid dividends, with our picks of a very strong bunch including 'Beams', the dreamy 'Mali' (a track inspired by that country's vibrant musical culture), and the life-affirming dancefloor shuffle of 'The Waxing Gibbous Moon'.

Review: Rose Robinson's debut album as Tigerbalm, 2022's International Love Affair, was a genuinely glorious affair in which she wrapped indigenous instrumentation and all manner of global music influences around grooves rooted in cosmic disco, nu-disco, proto-house, Italo and Balearic beats. This palette of influences once again comes to the fore on this remixed version, which boasts some of her favourite artists rework tracks from the LP. It's all killer, no filler - as the old saying goes - with our picks including Session Victim''s percussive deep house fix of 'Cocktail D'Amore', Isaac Soto's devilishly dubbed-out interpretation of 'La Brisa', a hybrid jazz-funk/Balearic soul re-build of 'Cosmic Camel' by Mystic Jungle, and a predictably proto-house leaning vocal interpretation of 'Tokyo Business' by Andrew Meecham AKA The Emperor Machine.

Review: Rose Robinson is something of a rising star: a musician and producer inspired by the twin delights of disco and the different musical cultures she's encountered during her travels around the world. Her debut album as Tigerbalm does a brilliant job in fusing these together, with Robinson and a string of vocalists and guest musicians giddily flipping between bongo-laced, early morning dub disco ('Kete'), colourful and extra-percussive nu-disco ('Tokyo Business'), hot-stepping Afro-house ('Waiheke'), revivalist NYC proto-house (the incredible 'Cosmic Camel'), spaced-out samba-house ('Bahia Escapista'), Latin-fired, Prince style purple funk ('Riad De Lister') and her dark, rolling, atmospheric and sweat-soaked tribute to tribal house ('Cocktail D'Amour', a track inspired by the Berlin LGBTQ+ party collective of the same name).