Alpha Steppa & Nai-Jah - The Great Elephant (Steppas Records)

This time the cover of the album features an elephant rather than a bird (once again a work by Steppa's mother Eve), referring to album title 'The Great Elephant'. You can even hear the trumpeting of said elephant in 'Progress', a song in which Nai-Jah compares the political affairs with the procession of Echternach: three steps forward, two steps back. The project, which Ben Alpha describes as: "A family thing" (apart from his mother, who provided the cover image, there's sister Danie who took care of the backing vocals, father John Sprosen who mixed 'Africa Is Great', and finally Oster, the Nai-Jah's dad, who can be heard in the album's intro poem), turned into a double album, with 10 vocal cuts and as many dubs.

The vocal part takes the listener back to the days of Nai-Jah's youth in Nigeria, where corruption ('Repatriate Your Dollars'), greed (in 'Rice Traffic' Nai-Jah talks about the scams Africans have to face when buying imported rice, where unscrupulous gangsters go as far as selling plastic rice), ecological disasters ('Amazon', a song opening with a traditional melody from the border region between Brazil and Peru, and warning us about the slow destruction of the planet) and human suffering are omnipresent; at the same time universal subjects anyone can connect with (or your name has to be Donald Trump). The instrumental part was entirely in the hands of Ben Alpha and the only guest musician on 'The Great Elephant' is trombonist Dave Andrews, who can be heard in 'Last Call'. The entire double album is good for about an hour and twenty minutes of listening pleasure, but we've already played it to death. Instant UK dub-classic!