Consumer Guide Album

Mahotella Queens: Buya Buya Come Back [Umsakazo, 2025]
It's been a quarter century since Lion of Soweto cum mbaqanga king Simon Mahlathini Nkabinde roared on this earth, so it would be going too far to claim that the superb live-in-U.K. 1988-89 Music Inferno is nevertheless not nearly as definitive as 1980's incomparable multi-artist Indestructible Beat of Soweto. The genre is just too male. Nonetheless, I have a hunch that at some future moment when I'm in the mood for an Indestructible Beat alternative this ebullient, newly recorded female sampler-cum-best-of will return to my CD player, fully annotated by Hilda Tloubatla, who joined up 60 years ago at 22 and is still at it. A