Hanni El Khatib Savage Times (Innovative Leisure) 4/5

MADE up of five previously released EPs, the fourth album from the San Francisco-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Hanni El Khatib is an extraordinary smorgasbord of musical styles and moods.

Born Brown, a pulsating, electroshock treatment of a song about El Khatib’s immigrant parents (“Ma came over in ’75/Dad came over in ’77/’81, I came alive/work, work, work, work to survive,” he yells), sits next to the disco hit-in-waiting Paralysed.

Black Constellation is a piano-led blues number while the title track, with its line “Savage times for the savage man,” has a particular resonance with Trump in the White House.

Fresh and exciting, with a generous side order of rock ’n’ roll attitude and black humour — check out the self-explanatory Gonna Die Alone — the 19 songs showcase a hugely gifted musician who seems to be able to turn his hand to anything.

Ian Sinclair

Frontier Ruckus Enter the Kingdom (Loose) 4/5

FRONTIER Ruckus, where have you been all my life? If, like me, you’re into US indie outfits, then you’ll adore the fifth album from this Michigan-based band.

One of its songs tells the story of frontman Matthew Milia’s dad losing his job and relying on disability benefits to survive in the singer’s childhood home, and other tracks are lyrically detailed and hypnotic stories of US suburban life.

“I’m home watching my dad watch the NFL alone,” Milia sings on opener Visit Me, which includes a brief banjo solo.

His reference to a motel “breakfast cereal dispenser” is positively poetic, while elsewhere he talks of someone’s “one-dimensional boyfriend” and his friends with “day jobs that they’re spurning” who are looking for work on Craigslist.

Melancholic and vulnerable with enticing hooks and superlative wordplay, here is a guitar band to fall in love with.

Ian Sinclair

Mokoomba Luyando (Outhere Records) 5/5

When identity is hard to hang on to in a world globalised by capitalism, bands like the Zimbabwean sextet Mokoomba — who affirm their culture and do it with modernity, sensitivity and aplomb — have to be shouted about from rooftops.

Although sung mostly in their native Tonga — of the Zambezi Valley — songs in Shona, Luvale and Ndebele are also included.

You’ll gasp with incredulity at the vocal scale and range of expression of the huskyvoiced Mathias Muzaza or Trustworth Samende’s delightful guitar riffs much as the measured, intelligent instrumental and backing-vocals support from the others.

In 1955 the Tonga were stripped of their ancestral land to make way for the Kariba dam — impoverished, they still wait to be connected to the grid. Kambowa tells the story.

The up-tempo Muzwile pulsates contagiously, while the melancholic Mabemba astonishes just as the serenity of the a cappella Nyaradzo does.

Michal Boncza