Dobet Gnahoré can legitimately claim that her education began after she dropped out of school at age 12 -- her neighborhood in Abidjan, Ivory Coast was a renowned artists' enclave and her father a master musician. In 1999, three years after she met her life partner and co-composer, French guitarist Colin Laroche de Féline, the couple relocated to France in order to escape increasing political unrest and raise their child in safely. There, they assembled a poly-national band and began to gather a following. A debut album,Ano Neko, was released in 2004 and in 2006, Dobet was nominated for a BBC "Newcomer of the Year" award. Her new release consolidates and expands upon the promise of the first. The singer's liquid-yet-artfully-fractured vocals, backed by semi-acoustic instruments and dulcet close-harmony singing, speak in a myriad of tongues about the evils of greed, polygamy, and pedophilia while encouraging self-determination, female empowerment and sane child-rearing. Like Marie Daulne of Zap Mama, Dobet has a queenly charisma and exhibits an extroverted theatricality. But hers is a more primal presence, seemingly drawn from the signposts of a woman's life rather than developed onstage before an audience. The product of diverse cultures but only one planet, she is a quintessential twenty-first century Afro-European.  --Christina Roden