''Lala Belu'' is the second

studio album An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as Digital distribution#Music, digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early ...

by Ethiopian singer-songwriter

Hailu Mergia Hailu Mergia () is an Ethiopian keyboardist, now based in Washington D.C., United States. He is best known for his role in the Walias Band in the 1970s, one of the most significant groups in Ethiopia’s "golden age" of music. Biography Hail ...

. It was released on 23 February 2018 under

Awesome Tapes From Africa Awesome Tapes From Africa is a record label and website operated by Brian Shimkovitz, based in Los Angeles, California. The site was founded in 2006 in Brooklyn, New York. History The site was created as a way for Shimkovitz to share music he had ...

Release

On 22 November 2017, Mergia announced his first album in 15 years, along with the single "Gum Gum".

Critical reception

''Lala Belu'' was met with "universal acclaim" reviews from critics. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, this release received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...

score of 81 based on 12 reviews. Aggregator Album of the Year gave the release a 73 out of 100 based on a critical consensus of 7 reviews. At

AnyDecentMusic? AnyDecentMusic? is a website that collates album reviews from magazines, websites, and newspapers. Primarily focused on popular music – covering rock, pop, electronic, dance, folk, country, roots, hip-hop, R&B, and rap – albums are adjudg ...

, the release was rated 7.2 out of 10 based on 10 reviews. Timothy Monger of

AllMusic AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...

described the album as a "lovely and deeply creative record", while explaining "touching on myriad emotions throughout its six tracks, the album is bright and joyful at times and occasionally funky while frequently veering into the more cerebral and introspective territory that marked his early solo years."

Accolades

Track listing

Personnel

Musicians *

– primary artist, producer * Tony Buck – drums * Mike Majkowski – bass Production * Javon Gant – engineer * Jessica Thompson – mastering

References

{{Authority control 2018 albums