Achan Malonda’s debut album looks like a carefully tied package, wrapped in the most important themes of the Berlin musician: MY HEART IS A DARK CONTINENT begins with a hymn to the feminist icon “Hedy Lamarr” and ends with an anti-racist double whammy. The pre-single “German sovereignty”, a rhythmically intricate confrontation with the arrogance of the white majority society, is followed by the “New Year’s speech” by the first black Federal Chancellor. Great fun, in which Malonda not only demands “we have to stop being white”, but also takes the most famous sentence of a predecessor a little further: “What we can’t do alone, we can do together now.”
Between these two poles, i.e. on the experiential foil of a Black German woman, it is about loneliness, relationship problems, expectations, queer desires and PMS, and some sentences very cleverly combine the private with the political: “You only want my good sides , but I’ve got more than one face,” Malonda sings, but sometimes the metaphors slip, as in “Because I Can,” which compares sex to a soccer game. But these are just small inconsistencies, which the always elegantly produced music catches: from the club ballad “Disco im Kopf” to the dream pop ballad “I’m going too far” to the art song satire “Matriarchin” – everything in all a pop package that shimmers in many colors.
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