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Buika

Mi Nina Lola

Warner Jazz 0825646327 454

From the first moment of exposure to the Buika voice on this beguiling album's opening title-track, you know you're in safe hands, such is her assurance and control.

Buika's vocals are imbued not only with the passionate intensity characterising the flamenco music to which she was exposed, as a child of parents from Equatorial Guinea growing up alongside a Gypsy community in the Spanish island of Majorca, but also with a soulful stridency and just enough graininess and breathiness to render them affectingly personal.

Her material ranges naturally between jazz-funk-tinged flamenco and touching original love songs (one with the odd verse in English, but sung in Spanish for the most part), but what lingers in the mind is the remarkable voice, pleasantly plangent yet slightly smoky, utterly compelling. Recommended.