Various Artists, Nigeria Special Volume 2: Modern Highlife, Afro-sounds And Nigerian Blues

The first Nigeria Special compilation was a delicious, wild concoction, full of strange psychedelia from a period where African groove met Western excess. The good news is that the second volume is, in its own loving way, even more bizarre. Where its predecessor ran full-tilt at the weird, Nigeria Special 2 unleashes its warped gems more subtly. Take Joy Nwoso and Dan Satch’s “Egwo Umo Agbogho,” for instance. It mixes a curiously formal, chiming melody, ticking underbeat and almost operatic vocals, three elements that shouldn’t work together, but do so here in an exceedingly odd, charming, but chilling fashion. Or there’s “Motako,” by Fidel Sax Batake and the Voices of Darkness, with its off-kilter fairground soul draped over layers of raw percussion, all topped off with keyboards and brass drenched in reverb. It’s beautifully disorienting, and all the more so for coming right after the far more traditional “Ochea Special.” Still, it wouldn’t be a Nigeria Special if it didn’t leap gloriously over the top at times — and it certainly does that with “Shango Oba Onina,” which sounds as if Black Ark-era Lee Perry had made a side trip with his echo chambers to Lagos. But even that can’t match “The Lord’s Prayer” from the Don Isaac Ezekiel Combination. It’s exactly what it says, the words of the Lord’s Prayer (with the added chorus of “It’s the Lord’s Prayer”); it just happens to be set over a beat so funky it sweats. Strange really doesn’t get any stranger than that. Or maybe it will on volume three…