ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

This week Charlie presents a selection of seven CDs which he considers to be the best albums of this year because of their consistent quality: one fabulous track followed by a lot of mediocre ones won’t do here.

He starts with Staff Benda Bilili, a Kinshasa-based group of mainly wheelchair bound musicians. Also from Africa there is Bonga, whose voice put Angola on the musical map back in the 1970s and who is still going strong four decades later.

The two European entries in the list are both relatively new artists with their first albums: the musical and linguistic twists of DVA from the Czech Republic range freely over central and eastern Europe while Imam Baildi have reworked and remixed classic rembetika tracks from half a century ago.

CeU’s hauting Brazilian voice hovers just on the edge of what one critic called the ‘samba cool’. From Asia, Japanese producer Makoto Kubota has a long track record of updating tunes from all over the continent: his latest foray is into the traditional music of Okinawa. Fat Freddy’s Drop (pictured below) are currently one of Wellington’s best known cultural exports whose two most recent albums both topped the charts.