★★★★☆
In a music world dominated by charisma vacuums, where James Bay uses a stupid hat as a substitute for a personality, Yannick Ilunga could never be accused of being humdrum. This extraordinary musician was born in Brussels to a Congolese father and an Angolan mother, has lived for most of his life in South Africa, calls himself by an ungrammatical French name and makes what he calls “noir-wave” or “new wave with an African aesthetic”. Bland he ain’t.
A favourite of musicians including the American rapper Mos Def and Solange Knowles, sister of Beyoncé, the 25-year-old Ilunga cut a laconic, magnetic figure, all in white and wearing a cylindrical African hat (don’t even think about it, Bay). You could immediately detect the new-wave influence: his sinuous, sullen baritone variously recalled Robert Smith of the Cure, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode and Phil Oakey of the Human League, and he and his band offered plenty in the way of turbulent guitars and austere synths.
Less prominent was the “African aesthetic”, although there were shimmering tropical guitars on La Vie est Belle, the title track of his excellent debut album, and tribal percussion on Down, whose hypnotic chorus Ilunga used to whip up the crowd into some feverish call-and-response.
“Moody Eighties pastiche plus world-music trimmings” is a useful shorthand for what Ilunga does, then, but it doesn’t capture the full panorama of his sound. His admiration for Kanye West and Blood Orange suggests that, like them, he is a black artist who refuses to be ghettoised into one genre. That impression was reinforced by the electronic explosions on a new song, Freedom, the pre-recorded rap in French on La Vie est Belle and the backing vocalists on MDR trilling “You’re the one that I want” in a nod to Grease. There’s no one remotely like Petite Noir, and how often do you say that these days?