65 f


written for the fourteen-piece band Dan and The Lookout Pack, shows epic soundscape and ’80s funk-influenced workouts and A Beat Drop uses beatbox rhythms over reeling Clare concertina swirls and lush strings. Will I Won’t comes in on crisp concertina and acoustic guitar before the vortex shoots it into overdrive. This is a new box of tricks for Padraig Rynne, exciting, pulsating, nerve edged and melodically serene. Notify is upfront, left-field, brash and demanding but leaves scorch marks on the brain.


www.padraigrynne.com Sierra Leone’s Refugee All-Stars


SIERRA LEONE’S REFUGEE ALL STARS Libation Cumbancha CMB CD 30


They have been playing together for a decade and are now veterans, seasoned road warriors of stature and renown. Unbeliev- able how a band of young people, fleeing the horror of the Sierra Leonean civil war, ended up in a refugee camp in Conakry, Guinea, and through the forces of fate and strong hearts were discovered and became one of the world’s favourite African bands. This is their fourth album, and instantly appealing. More acoustic in sound than its predecessors, the ambience is warm, easy- going, and utterly tight. No clutter whatso- ever. They have made a conscious effort this time to draw from the folkloric styles of Sier- ra Leone – highlife and palm wine are among the ingredients, also soukous, though, as ever, the main thrust of the band is reggae. Quite conservative, you’d have to say, but if you wanted a foolproof African album for a non-fan, this would do fine.


www.cumbancha.com Rick Sanders


PADRAIG RYNNE Notify Own Label PRCD 002


CRAOBH RUA


I’d Understand You If I Knew What You Meant Own Label BTBCD 0015


County Clare concertina exponent Padraig Rynne’s career has seen him rub shoulders with maverick Celtic talents and legends, among them Donal Lunny and Sylvan Barou and the eclectic quintet Guidewires. His latest collection Notify takes him on a new road stylistically. Using a rock rhythm section com- prised of American indie rock players he heads into electronic indie and post-rock waters. It’s experimental, but instead of using beatboxes and bags of tricks Notify uses gui- tarist Tyler Duncan, drummer Mike Shimmon and bassist Joe Dart resulting in deconstruct- ed contemporary Celtic music with a beating heart. The sound is often big, bold and pow- erful with an intensely brooding atmosphere, by times looped and spaced out to oblivion. Rynne pens tunes for deceased parents and newly-born children that sound fresh and inventive yet sincere. The 100 Kilo Chase,


Belfast’s Craobh Rua take a more conser- vative approach on their latest album. Their first album in fourteen years finds them regrouping and rediscovering a lost groove and mojo. What set Craobh Rua apart from the pack was the intelligence of their arrangements which highlighted individual expertise in a band setting while avoiding over-dominance. The opening Hunting The Hare sets the scene with subtle breaks on banjo, fiddle, pipes and whistle within a full band palette, a policy repeated on The Lass Of Ballintra while the quieter strains of Squire Wood’s Lament On The Refusal Of His Halfpence allows piper Dessie McCabe ample chance to shine. Singer Jim Rainey has a breathy raw vocal quality best found on an emotive take on The Unquiet Grave and Na Bauchailli Ailin where his vocals are enveloped with a subtle yet inventive arrangement. Craobh Rua’s collective finesse and solidity makes the long-awaited CD a feast of subtle pleasures.


www.craobhrua.com John O’Regan THE WILSON FAMILY


The Wilson Family Album Harbourtown HARCD 055


If you want to build a wall of sound based on north-eastern voices, you can’t have a more solid foundation than The Wilsons. The Fami- ly, seen recently adding weight and credibili- ty to the Sting project, The Last Ship, have been belting out their particular brand of unaccompanied singing for almost 35 years.


This collection is as good a definition of their approach as you could wish for. Clear, direct, relatively uncomplicated – that is the Wilson way. Their Family Album was already something of a retrospective when it was first released on vinyl in 1991, being made up of the songs they had most enjoyed singing in their first twelve years as performers.


This first CD release gives them the chance to add an extra track – the familiar north-east anthem Rap Her T’Bank – which somehow slipped through first time round. There is a timeless quality to a cappella singing; there’s not really a great deal to go out of fashion. So old favourites like Byker Hill and Young Banker still sound perfectly fresh in recordings almost a quarter of a cen- tury old.


The Wilsons are so firmly associated with that sort of traditional work-out, that the other strand of their work – contemporary, often political, songs sung in the same stripped-down mode – sometimes gets over- looked. It already made up a good slice of their repertoire in 1991, however, and is per- haps best represented here by Ian Walker’s Hawks And Eagles.


The CD as a whole is not a substitute for hearing them live now, surrounded by the full warmth and presence of their voices, which the recording does not quite recap- ture. They are a lot more than Sting’s backing singers, though, and this is a welcome reminder of their robust qualities.


www.harbourtownrecords.com Dave Hadfield Bridges from Page 39


via an fRoots engineered meeting at Eth- noAmbient. Novakovic prowls the stage, his extraordinary shamanic voice sum- moning ghosts from folkore, energising his instrumental collaborators and forg- ing a brilliant alchemy of acoustic intrica- cy and rock intensity that makes quite a lot of us say “crikey!”


The short interval affords a welcome opportunity to take in cool oxygen as the South Bank Centre staff, mindful of the advanced age and frailty of some of us, have turned the heating thermostat all the way up. Before the music recom- mences, there are the much-prized ceramic fRoots Critics Poll awards to be dished-out. Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita receive their Best New Album prize from an ebullient and warmly received Cerys Matthews while David Suff (head hon- cho of Topic and Fledg’ling and folk- beard nonpareil) adds to his collection of Best Reissue awards for The Young Tradi- tion’s Oberlin 1968.


Mention should also be made of the stunning stage visuals created by Judith Burrows which back-project multi-layered, overlapping images of the performers, instruments, landscapes, bridges of all descriptions and folk song manuscripts (leading, at one point, to Ben Mandelson being captioned The Warbling Waggoner).


While Catrin and Seckou are the sole already existing act on the bill, their abili- ty to pull off the making time stand still trick is undiminished by familiarity – harp and kora weaving a spell on an audience left wanting more. If fRoots included a “best smiles” category in its Critics Poll, they’d win that too.


While Olivia Chaney and B.J. Cole


don’t offer the same possibility of cross- cultural surprises as some of the others, their set nevertheless represents a won- derfully complementary pairing of singer and accompanist. Cole (lest we forget) is the pedal steel maestro who put the Tum- bleweed in Sir Elton’s Connection and his endorsement of Chaney only adds to the growing sense of anticipation surround- ing her forthcoming debut album.


They’re joined on Dark Eyed Sailor by


Eliza Carthy who immediately returns for her much-anticipated performance with Martha Mavroidi. Having met each other for the first time only four days previously, Carthy and Mavroidi’s headline billing could be viewed as something of a risk, but any such doubts are quickly dispersed by the gleeful commitment of their per- formance as fiddle and lafta tunes are effortlessly swapped and combined, and voices harmonised (with Eliza, like Lisa Knapp before her, singing in Greek). Astonishingly it’s Martha’s first appear- ance on a UK stage and her return clearly can’t come soon enough for the great majority of us in the room.


Like all the best folk clubs, the evening ends with the entire cast herded back out for a final sing-song – in this instance The Banks Of The Sweet Primros- es, led by the irrepressible Eliza Carthy.


As everyone drifts out of the concert hall and heads for the buses/tubes/back- stage wine, one question seems to be on everyone’s lips. Why doesn’t this kind of thing happen much more often?


F


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84