video review: 'black star elephant' by nico & vinz

Forgot to post this last night, but still a solid album that's worth your consideration. Check it out!

Next up... Christ, next week is bonkers. Taylor Swift, Run The Jewels, and Lil Wayne (provided he doesn't delay his album again). Either way, it's going to be nuts - stay tuned!

album review: 'black star elephant' by nico & vinz

So here's a fun challenge: name an African musical act. (Die Antwoord) Okay, now name one that actually has charted or has a hope in hell of charting in America. If you start looking through the Billboard charts, you'll find that that list is pretty damn small. Music from around the world already has limited representation on the American charts outside of Canada and the UK, and from Africa you can change the qualifier from 'limited' to 'barely any'.

And yet this year that changed with an act that burst onto the scene with eclectic instrumentation, a decidedly unique textured sound that was unlike anything else on the charts, and an uncanny knack for lodging itself in our subconscious. And of course, the act I'm talking about is KONGOS, a South African-based act that dropped their debut album in 2012 and it took well over a year and a half for their biggest hit 'Come With Me Now' to crash onto our charts, particularly in Canada where it broke the Top 10.

But I can bet that was not the act the majority of you were thinking about, was it? No, if you asked what music landed on the charts that had a decidedly 'African' vibe, you would have said Nico & Vinz and their song 'Am I Wrong'... and really, you'd have been half-right. Nico Sereba is Norwegian-Ivorian and Vincent Dery is Norwegian-Ghanaian, and it's clear that they draw much of their influences from African worldbeat music, but the song has more than a few hallmarks of their Norwegian synthpop background as well, which gives it a decidedly odd vibe from a production standpoint and a song that I've been trying to make sense of for months now. In other words, I had to know more, so I made it a priority to check out their first credited album as Nico & Vinz, Black Star Elephant. What did I find?