Lamento Cubano – Lourdes Pita (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Music is always able to morph itself into many forms. Some are bombastic. Some infectious. It may be energetic or ambient. But music is most effective when it is able to be seductive. Seductive music works on your senses, plays with emotions, is beguiling and alluring and affects you on a more primitive and primordial level.

Lamento Cubano is the perfect example of seductive music at work. Not only does the music do all of the things I have just listed, but it also acts as a vehicle that travels both over distance and in time. Listen to this, and you will find yourself transported to a small bar in a version of Cuba that is no longer recognisable. And like a character in a Graham Greene novel or Hemingway himself, you will find that you become wedded to such a place, an able, or at least unwilling to leave its seductive charms.

Delicate guitars and charming, chiming pianos are joined by the evocative sound of muted trumpets as Lourdes Pita serenades you with the sound of a place that now seems positively otherworldly. But at least we can still catch a glimpse of it in music such as this.