New Album By Carmen Souza, Be Prepared To Be Addicted

All right, I really hate when people do this, but here it goes. Carmen Souza sounds like if Tracy Chapman and Ziggy Marley had a kid, and then the members of Rusted Root babysat that kid, then when it got older and went to music school it started to listen to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald and maybe even a little Phish late at night. Phew.

Carmen Souza grew up in a Cape Verdean family in Lisbon, Portugal, and began performing in her teens. In 2005 Souza broke into the international scene with her album Ess ê nha Cabo Verde, which used her ancestor’s dialect Creole, and mixed traditional African and Cape Verde rhythms like Batuke, Morna, Cola djon, and others.

She followed that up with Verdade in 2008, and next week she releases her third album, Protegid, which includes the above track, “AfriKa,” a song I guarantee will get stuck in your head for, oh, the next 3 weeks or so.

You can pre-order the disc here at Amazon.

posted by Matt Stabile on June 2, 2010 @ 8:00 am