Album: Various artists, Next Stop Soweto – Township Sounds...(Strut)

We've had plenty of vintage music from Mali, Nigeria and the Congo in recent years but very little from South Africa, so this CD is an exciting prospect for music lovers.

This is raw, joyous, and absurdly catchy township jive, primarily from the 1970s, that speaks of the resilience and optimism of a people with seemingly no way out of the vicious apartheid regime that even labelled black musicians criminals. For better or worse, there would be no Vampire Weekend if this stuff didn't exist. Indispensable.