The Very Best's singer Esau Mwamwaya very rarely sings in English, so Westerners who make up most of his group's audience have to rely on feeling alone, and Mwamwaya's got plenty of that. It's probably a gross oversimplification to call Mwamwaya a happy singer, but there's a sense of pure liquid joy in almost every one of his vocal performances; you can practically hear his grin through the microphone, and that level of giddy enthusiasm is about as infectious as it gets. On the group's 2008 debut mixtape, Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit Are the Very Best, the European DJ duo Radioclit threw all sorts of pan-global dance and pop tracks at Mwamwaya, and he elevated nearly every one of them with that keening, high-pitched wail. You could do plenty of cultural-studies theorizing about all the levels of appropriation at work in that first mixtape-- white DJs snatching Vampire Weekend's quasi-African indie pop and refashioning it for an African singer. But actually listening to the final product, all that was beside the point. This wasn't a mental exercise; it was a joyously physical full-length, a gifted singer sliding across the pop landscape with a border-transcending glee.
The Very Best followed that mixtape up with a triumphant debut album, 2009's Warm Heart of Africa, and now they're back with another free mixtape, one released to the Internet on Mother's Day after little more than a week of notice. But things within the group are different now. They've spent nearly three solid years on the road and in the studio, and now they're down to a duo; Radioclit has broken up, and one of those Euro DJs, Etienne Tron, is off to focus on other projects. It's tough to say what effect those new circumstances had on the group, but the new Super Mom is a markedly different piece of work from that first mixtape. The group's debut thrived in part on its sense of momentum; it let up only when it reached the suite of dizzily gorgeous ballads at the end. But even though Super Mom has more than its share of huge, swooping choruses and amped-up utilitarian dance beats, it's more of a trudge than its predecessor, and the tracks haven't been chosen with the same near-perfect sense of velocity and timing.
Consider, for example, the group's version of Kanye West's "Runaway", which comes only five tracks into Super Mom. "Runaway" is a great song and all, but here it's a total momentum killer, more than six minutes of midtempo millionaire self-pity in the middle of what had been a dance party. Remaining producer Johan Hugo leaves the track almost untouched, letting Kanye and Pusha T deliver their verses in full and limiting Mwamwaya to intro and outro appearances and mid-verse ad-libs. It's a ballsy attempt at a hijacking, but Mwamwaya sounds awkwardly shoehorned into a song-- the sort of song that simply can't accommodate him.
When Mwamwaya and Hugo are fully locked-in, there's still plenty of the sunburst happiness of that first album and EP, and putting Mwamwaya over a refashioned version of Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" was an inspired choice. But more often than not, Hugo leaves giant chunks of the original songs intact, and nobody needs to hear Billy Idol's "Eyes Without a Face" when Mwamwaya only halfway gets to take it over. Another issue: An absolute horde of guest vocalists appears on the tape, few of them displaying anything like Mwamwaya's verve. It's a lot of fun to hear Mwamwaya alongside Senegalese legend Baaba Maal on "Miracle", but he barely gets a word in edgewise amid all the rappers, singers, and chanters on the jackhammer dance track "Secousse". Mwamwaya's voice is clearly the greatest thing the Very Best have going for them, and it's a bit weird to hear all these other people crowding him out.
Of course, Super Mom is more of a quickie release than a fleshed-out artistic statement, and it's easy to imagine time constraints causing its relative thinness. The two entirely original tracks on the mixtape go a long way toward proving the duo still has gas left in its tank. The tape-opening title track shows everything anyone ever loved about the group in the first place, Mwamwaya airily belting over absurdly catchy, melodically fluid synth riffs. And the even more propulsive "Ndekha" builds up for two and a half minutes before the beat fully kicks in; when the hammer finally drops, it's glorious. Super Mom doesn't showcase the group at its best throughout. But as long as they're still capable of magic moments like these, they'll be impossible to write off.
