69 f
boards) and Sarah Hayes (flute) – deliver it all with such entrancing warmth and sincerity you are instinctively drawn into Polwart’s testing challenge to deconstruct the finer details of her poetic lyrics. And that is a chal- lenge of many rich rewards.
www.karinepolwart.com Colin Irwin KARINDING ATTACK
Garbang Kerajaan Serigala Karat Music (no cat no or barcode)
All praise to Face- book. Somebody shared a grainy YouTube clip of a man playing the karinding, a funky Sundanese jews harp made from bamboo or sugar palm bark. A few minutes of procrastination later and up popped a video of this amazing band, and a bit of concentrated e-detective work from my inner Dirk Gently established contact.
Karinding Attack
extend herself at every turn both as per- former and one of Britain’s most accom- plished songwriters speaks volumes about her ambition and desire – a desire which climbs to new levels on this complex, thoughtful, engrossing and ultimately sub- stantial album.
It’s been over four years since we last heard from her via the traditional Fairest Floo’er released almost in tandem with the self-composed This Earthly Spell and, via the thrillingly eclectic Burns Unit, she’s clearly taken plenty of stock before re-entering the fray with a significantly more expansive agenda exercised in collusion with producer Iain Cook from Glasgow indie band The Unwinding Hours. Space and atmosphere vie with inviting layers of cinematic mood music to add measure and intrigue to material that seldom conforms to Polwart’s more familiar storybook style and is occasionally even wil- fully obtuse. Thus we get songs that range from Charles Darwin’s ruminations on the death of his daughter (We’re All Leaving, originally written for The Darwin Project), the death of a young family member (Strange News), reflections on the history surrounding an elderly neighbour (Salter’s Road) and a particularly affecting parable about the human impact of a heartless Donald Trump development in Scotland (Cover Your Eyes).
The fact that the precise nature of these topics may not always be immediately appar- ent might be seen as a weakness, but such ambiguities never troubled early Bob Dylan fans and Polwart’s approach is fully vindicat- ed on the final track Half A Mile – which she describes as the most difficult song she’s ever written – a poignant re-imagination of the fatal last walk of Susan Maxwell, a child from the Scottish borders who was the same age as Karine herself when she was murdered on her way home one day, the first time she’d been out on her own. This is Polwart, not as journalist but as evocative creator of impres- sions, analogies and images that combine to paint a sensitive, consuming bigger picture; none more so than King Of Birds, which takes the Occupy Movement’s protests outside St Paul’s Cathedral as its starting point for an allegorical history of the iconic landmark, with Christopher Wren in the title role.
The album’s working title was Carto -
graphy and a strong sense of place, environ- ment and travel remain its overriding themes. The subtleties might severely test the patience and concentration levels of even her most devoted fan base except, of course, that she and her trusty musicians – including brother Steven (guitar), Inge Thomson (accordeon, percussion), Iain Cook (key-
The fascinating sleevenotes give us the cultural and social history of the instrument and its variants, up to early modern karinding groups like Cineam’s Sekar Komara Sunda from the 1950s, and beyond. This band are something else though. Formed by musicians with backgrounds in punk, hardcore and metal music, they’ve taken the energy, aggression and attitude (but not the sound) of those Western genres and invested it into traditional music. In other words, no buzz- saw guitar posturing and leadenly battered drum kits, but one of the fullest-on tradition- al music sounds you’re likely to encounter on the planet. They give it 11 on multiple karind- ings, celempung renteng and khokhol renteng (resembling giant balofons made of slitted bamboo tubes, like an array of tuned log drums), sulings and saluangs (bamboo flutes), goong tiup (looks like a coiled didgeridoo!) and lots more. Again, the web provides: you can see pictures of all the instruments by pointing a browser at
http://en.indonesian-
stuff.com/?attachment_id=434 and clicking onwards on the ‘next’ link. Next indeed!
Over this glorious sound – the Bellow- head of bamboo gamelan music, though to be honest there are only the faintest hints of that Javanese relative – the ferocious lead vocal strays into Yat-Kha growly throat singing territory with wiggy backings from singers who specialise in what the credits delightfully call “bird voices”.
If your boggled reviewer has failed to give you the full picture, you can hear a track on this issue’s fRoots 40 compilation. Needless to say, not a whiff of UK distribution but you can find them at
www.reverbnation.com/ karindingattackofficial
Ian Anderson
DUFFY POWER Tigers Dusk Fire DUSKCD106
Blues Power, a reissue of Duffy Power’s recordings from 1969-1970 has been amongst that small
group of CDs that I always take if I’m going on a long car journey since it appeared back in 1992. Tigers is the first album of new recordings that he has released since the Innovations LP that came out on Transatlantic in 1971, so I approached it with excitement but some trepidation.
The guitar accompaniments are immedi- ately striking – he’s using nylon-strung guitar in a most innovative way; beautiful chording but also powerfully rhythmic and hypnotic.
Photo: Rodabawah
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