world music
howard.male
What do you get when you cross a Swiss Cajun punk band with a London garage rockabilly band? Well, if it’s not a contrived record company manoeuvre, but instead came about because the two bands just happened to bump into each other at a festival and got along like a house on fire, you get a wonderfully organic, rough-edged party of an album which makes you suspect that the genre of Cajun punk garage rockabilly has always been with us.Perhaps part of this record’s success lies in the fact that both bands are only trios, so Hipbone Slim brought a double bass to the table, and Mama Rosin a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Subtlety is overrated. I've always thought so. Critical consensus too often rates nuanced, emasculated emoting over music that smashes you over the head with an iron bar. From hardcore punk to gabber to speed metal to the sort of dubstep that sounds like four-storey bass bins begging for mercy, music that's ballistic doesn't leave room for quibbling. You're either on the bus or you can piss off and listen to Bon Iver in your bedroom.Yes, yes, tonight's Balkan Brass Battle gig awoke the raw punk in me. It was completely relentless: no ballads, no pauses, just sheer demented high BPM Read more ...
howard.male
As someone brought up on the concise innocent perfection of the pop single, I have to confess I’m a bit of a hard sell when it comes to sprawling instrumentals. They feel like unfinished songs to me; empty landscapes that need figures in them to create context, narrative, or just a focal point to give meaning to the whole. But there have been a few primarily instrumental acts over the years that have convinced me, and the multicultural five-piece Syriana have now joined their ranks.But having said that, it was something of a disappointment that it was only a five-piece that took to the stage Read more ...
howard.male
When Western musicians add their bit to traditional African music it can be disastrous: a programmed beat awkwardly forcing sinuous, sensual music to conform to its rigidity, or some dreadful rock vocalist doing a Bono all over some exquisite interplay of mbira and talking drums. But here we have a London collective working with a bunch of musicians from Nairobi, and refreshingly their presence doesn’t for one moment seem unnatural or intrusive.The first indication of a London sensibility at work on this debut album appears on the opening track “Gone thum mana gi nyadhi” in the form of the Read more ...
howard.male
London-based trio Les Triaboliques should perhaps be grateful that Wikipedia hasn’t included them in their entry on supergroups. There you will find a comprehensive list of so-called supergroups with leadenly histrionic names like Isles and Glaciers, Shrinebuilder and How to Destroy Angels (not to mention the super-supergroups that started it all such as Cream, Humble Pie and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But Adams, Edmonds and Mandelson are, I suppose, the alt-supergroup, representing something of an evolutionary jump forward - if for no other reason than they are musically co-operating Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For 30 years African Head Charge have been ploughing their unique sonic furrow, wandering hazy-dazed around the outer borders of experimental dub and super-mellow sounds. When they first appeared in 1981 on Adrian Sherwood's groundbreaking On-U Sound label there was no equivalent band to compare them to, except some of Brian Eno's global magpie studio excursions, notably My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne which provided them with a sonic template.However, led by percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, who's based in Ghana and London these days, they found a wider, if still niche, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Sometimes it seems as though every bit of music from the past has been disinterred, no matter how obscure or outré it is. But, of course, surprises keep on coming and the Psychedelic Pernambuco compilation is a reminder that great stuff still lurks out there. Collecting material recorded for the Brazilian independent Rozeblit label, Psychedelic Pernambuco roams through weird folk, post-Tropicália strangeness, fractured instrumentals and more.Brighton’s Mr Bongo label issues Psychedelic Pernambuco next month. The specialist Latin imprint seems to be on a roll right now as last month they Read more ...
howard.male
The downside of this job is that because new CDs are dropping through the letterbox every day, a lot of stuff inevitably gets consigned to the archives and forgotten about, when it really shouldn’t be. So when I heard that The Mexican Institute of Sound (aka Mexico City’s Camilo Lara) was rather belatedly playing live in London for the first time (his last album was released two years ago), it was an excuse to reacquaint myself with his recorded works to see if they were as good as they seemed at the time. The good news is that they are, but the less good news is that this concert Read more ...
howard.male
Given that Seun Kuti and Egypt 80’s new album nearly blew my speaker covers off with its focused punch and irrepressible energy, the band really shouldn’t have had a problem making an impression on Tuesday night’s lacklustre Later… with Jools Holland. But bafflingly, they chugged awkwardly into life but never got up a proper head of steam. A frustratingly bass-light sound mix obviously didn't help, but nevertheless it somewhat dampened my previously high expectations for last night’s Royal Festival Hall gig.But this muted TV performance must have been down to the fact that a good Afrobeat Read more ...
howard.male
Although the phrase “world music” was first coined by American ethnomusicologist Robert Brown in the 1960s, it didn’t become a brand, as it were, until 1987, when a bunch of London-based DJs, musicians and record company folk (including the late Charlie Gillett) met in an Islington pub and landed on the idea of putting all this foreign music under one commercially viable umbrella. So you could say that world music was spawned so that record shops would know where to put world music records.The name almost immediately became both a blessing and a curse. But today, I would argue, it’s mostly a Read more ...
mark.kidel
Concerts are not what they used to be: in an attempt to break the mould of conventional performance styles, promoters and artists are increasingly turning to explanatory introductions, visual aids and other means of drawing the audience in, as if music alone could not work the crowd. The Senegalese singing star Baaba Maal is touring with the journalist and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah, and their show combines relaxed but clearly scripted conversation with stunning songs from Maal’s Fulani repertoire.Advertised as Tales from the Sahel, and an exploration of “how such mythological tales Read more ...
howard.male
Why do bands still insist on dabbling in drum’n’bass? It was always an absurd, overwrought style, even when it first assaulted our eardrums in the mid-1990s. It’s more like a technological malfunction of the drum machine than a natural, felt groove, hurtling along, as it tends to, at a ridiculous 200 beats per minute. Ironically, Marseilles’s Watcha Clan probably think it’s one of their strengths that they throw a couple of tracks into their live set powered by this anachronistic rhythm, but they are much more effective when utilising less familiar grooves.Rich Mix is a relatively new north- Read more ...