rescuing musical virtue in distress.
I cover so much contemporary, western music on this site that it is easy to forget that culturally, as well as, geographically, the world is still a very big and diverse place. It is music such as Moon Rituals which makes for the perfect reminder of such a fact. For every chart-seeking pop star with... Continue Reading →
Not all music is made to satisfy the more everyday urges. Yes, we all like an uplifting tune whilst we get ready to go out on a Friday night, a catchy singalong on the jukebox at the bar or a rousing anthem to help us let off steam but as musical iceberg analogies go, that... Continue Reading →
I was, for a long time, concerned about the state of music. Not sonically speaking but that in these darkening and divided times it had lost its true voice. After all rock ’n’ roll, punk, hip-hop, grunge and most other important musical scenes grew out of disenchantment and frustration and if the state of the... Continue Reading →
Reviewing music from the ‘World Music’ category is difficult. You’re challenged by fact that the lyrics to the songs are sung in a language other than English and therefore you lose the chance to write about the words and the stories within these songs. But, as a result, you’re challenged to listen to the music... Continue Reading →
We hear so much about World Music these days, a phrase so broad that it borders on meaningless, just a lazy way of labelling something with a more culturally specific name, be it Balkan folk, Afrobeat or groovesome Latin Salsa. To really qualify for the term surely you would have to be making music which... Continue Reading →
There may be folky, western vibes at the heart of Refugee, but it revels in sonic ideas garnered from across the globe, with a particular love for the sounds of south-east Asia, the tabla drums and flitting flutes adding exotic balance to the more familiar instrumentation. And although I don’t really like the term World... Continue Reading →
Writing about a song that is being sung in a language other than my own has both disadvantages and advantages. On the down side, without that direct lyrical communication the song's narrative and meaning is going to pass me by. But this also leads to the big plus point, that if I don’t have the... Continue Reading →
Some music fits neatly into custom built, generic boxes and there is nothing wrong with that. But fad and fashions come and go, tastes change, music moves on and I find the music which survives, which continues to be relevant, which may even one day be regarded as classic is that which seems to be... Continue Reading →
There are many reasons to cover other peoples songs and in my opinion most of them are not really very honest. I know that you can make an argument for tradition and wanting to honour your favourite songs but for my money, unless you can bring something new to it then all you are doing... Continue Reading →
If you like your music to come with a heavy dose of drama and no small amount of pathos then Through Infinity are definitely going to tick a lot of boxes for you. Wandering between a sort of theatrical rock and the more intricate and exploratory end of the genre, they also blend in graceful,... Continue Reading →
It must be difficult selling a foreign-language album into the already saturated market of English-speaking releases, sure we all like an occasional ‘Gangnam Style’ or ‘Despasito’ to shake it up, but on the whole English-speaking music fans like English speaking bands. So, to combat this, the music has to be good. Duke Ellington once said,... Continue Reading →
As every student of Greek mythology will know, Dionysus was the son of the mortal Greek Princess Semele and was fathered by Zeus, but after Semele’s death (of fright after Zeus revealed his Godly power to her) Zeus took the unborn Dionysus and attached him to his thigh until his birth. Pretty grand stuff, even... Continue Reading →
They say that in life - and in music - timing is everything, and within ‘The Darkness Between the Leaves’ comes the feeling that we’re leaving summer and entering into the changing season of autumn, which, as I write this, we are. The album opens with the words “the nights are getting colder, the summer... Continue Reading →
When you hear the term “holiday music” what springs to mind depends on which part of the world you are from and what your cultural heritage sounds like. With this in mind Greg Herriges has collected together music which goes beyond the Holly and The Ivy of the western Christmas traditions and recorded, reworked and... Continue Reading →
All manner of musical genres and bi-genres end up in the pile of cd’s I get to look through and review, anything from folk or acoustic singer/songwriter to various offerings from rock, indie and punk but occasionally something turns up that stops you in your tracks and makes you think or (in this case) say... Continue Reading →
There are a few odd and almost indefinable generic terms in music, handles used mainly by lazy journalists, like myself, to easily box music, the draw lines of demarcation in an effort to say it is one thing or another. Of all of them the worst is the term "world music"…music that is representative of... Continue Reading →
Dead Can Dance have announced details of a brand new album entitled ‘Dionysus’, which is set for release on 2nd November via [PIAS] Recordings. ACT I : Sea Borne - Liberator of Minds - Dance of the Bacchantes ACT II : The Mountain - The Invocation - The Forest – Psychopomp Pre-order the album and... Continue Reading →
World music has always mixed well with dance beats and electronic music largely because they share a common purpose. Music that can trace its sounds back though history and heritage, has survived the fickle fortunes and fads that fashion dictates because it was the dance music of its day. Club sounds are the dance music... Continue Reading →
Take a female singer/songwriter/producer from Delhi in India, give her a musical education from London and drop her into the boiling pot of influences of a city like, oh I don’t know… New York, and it would be pretty interesting to hear what she came up with, well Rivita is that woman and her new... Continue Reading →
I once heard a folk tale that every place on the map has its own voice and tale to tell. Not just natural features such as rivers and trees, rocks and mountains but even man made structures and the more ancient they are the more they have to tell. It is for this reason bards... Continue Reading →
As one half of Dead Can Dance, Lisa Gerrard explored wonderful sonic territory and created music which wandered between re-imagined world sounds and soundtrack style arrangements, she painted with cinematic and widescreen musical colours, and balanced the ethereal and the neo-classical. She has since been associated with numerous big budget soundtracks but is equally likely... Continue Reading →
From the punningly clever title and the vibes emanating from the cover, it is obvious that this is no mere return to the rock based journeys that formed last years Growing Wild. And as I said at the time, even that was a new take on the instrumental rock guitar format, exploring some wonderful musical... Continue Reading →
Listening to an album in a language that you are not fluent in (I’m English, most of us barely have a handle on our own language let alone those of our neighbours) is a bit like watching a subtitled film. For just as then you have the translation running along the bottom of the screen,... Continue Reading →
Folk music, roots music, world music, Americana…all terms which only go a very small way to describing what Chris Murphy does, for in many ways they are terms far too loaded down with implication to do the job efficiently. This is about seeing the wood for the trees, and Murphy’s wood is as much about... Continue Reading →
None other than Louis Armstrong keenly observed that “All music is folk music, I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song,” and in his colloquially rich and triple negative way, he was right. If folk music is music by the people, of the people, for the people, then it doesn’t take much of a... Continue Reading →
Twenty years and nine albums down the line from his debut release, The Latin Jazz Project, and Tony Marino is still expertly exploring the boundaries and back roads of that genre. This new album takes instrumental excursions through myriad sub-genres, from the expected Samba, Calypso and Funk to the more niche grooves associated with the... Continue Reading →
Los Angeles based Cambodian and American rock band Dengue Fever announced today that they are set to begin a deluxe reissue campaign to release the bands long out-of-print back catalog via their own Tuk Tuk Records. Both critically acclaimed titles are set for release on May 26th in the UK. Each title features new bonus... Continue Reading →
The original intention was to come at this album purely from a musical perspective - explore, discuss, opine just the musical factors that are found within it. But however hard you try to detach cause from result, it becomes an impossible task. Not only does the enormity of the events that sit behind this collection... Continue Reading →
Echo Park Orchestra have a gift that is rarely found in contemporary music, to be able to take extremes and weave them together into a middle ground experience that ticks more boxes than you were even expecting to be presented with. I’m not talking about extremes in mere musical terms, more in concept, as they... Continue Reading →
If the universe is indeed infinite as those clever types on BBC 2 shows are always trying to explain to my less than comprehending brain, then there must be a place where traditional Balkan folk tunes and first generation British punk meet. So why not here and now? Okay, a bit of clarity before I... Continue Reading →