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by repetition on repetition, slowly adding block on block. The sound is generally less raw – though still the masinko is the lead instrument, there’s also incongruous drum machine and electronic keyboard. It is all rather odd, spaced-out and bleary. But then suddenly along comes a vocal of such wild intensity it lifts your scalp, Endet New Gada- wo, for example, or Mela Mela where he seems to be wrestling with the very forces of darkness. Volcanic stuff indeed. It is sud- denly clear why Ethiopian musicians rated Kegne so highly.
www.terprecords.nl Rick Sanders
KEPA JUNKERA Galiza Fol Música 100FOL 1074
Basque trikitixa maestro Kepa’s newest big project is a look westward from Euskadi along Iberia’s north coast to the traditional music and musicians of Galicia. Physical- ly big too: a classy 23 cm square hardback version of a CD booklet containing texts
and elegant illustrations (though, less sub- stantially, the two CDs are just tucked into plastic slip-cases stuck inside the front and back covers). Galician label Fol does things well, championing a CD release as an occa- sion, with a desirable physical object that will be shown as well as played to friends rather than tucked away digitally.
Sometimes a star musician from one place presenting the music of another can be a matter of grafting himself into bands that already work perfectly well without him, or fronting with flavour-providing guest musi- cians in tow. But what Kepa has made here is a magnificent celebration and exposition of the essence of Galician traditional music, cre- ating things in collaboration with Galician musicians that they haven’t done themselves. From the wild Euskal irrintzi ululation and plank-pattering txalaparta meeting the wail of Galician gaita in the opening track, and skittering trikitixa bringing a new staccato- reeds dimension to the Galician sound, the two neighbouring but different traditions and instrumentations make a good fit. Not a blurring, but a bringing into sharp focus of what makes Galician music great.
Plenty of tradition and memorable tunes meld with the present-day arranging and recording ideas of the musicians and bands, who aren’t thrown into a melting-pot or superficial encounters but are each given their own section of from one to three tracks, in which the characteristics and strengths of their particular approach to the music are brought out.
Some are internationally known, others not, but equally notable. Treixadura’s full- throated group vocal choral sound, with gaitas, drums and tambourine, particularly evokes fond memories of my first teenage encounters with living traditional music in Galicia. The Galician music boom in the late 20th Century was rather instrument-domi- nated, so it’s good to hear plenty of gutsy solo and group singing here from Uxía, Leilía, Davide Salvado, aCentral Folque, Luar Na Lubre and the young choral O Noso Lar and with the massed harps, gaitas, hurdy- gurdies, violins and traditional percussion of the Rodrigo Romaní-led big band Sondeseu. Pandereteiros De O Fiadeiro play the tam- bourines that, as pandeireta and pandero respectively, are a key (though differently played) feature of both Galician and Euskal music, often appearing on this album, some- times alongside the txalaparta duo of Iñigo Olazabel and Argibel Euba who create a use- ful percussion role on many tracks.
Kepa Junkera
One important voice surprisingly missing is that of Mercedes Peón, massively influen- tial in today’s Galician music, but her pres- ence is felt in Banda Das Crechas’ version of Lelele, and her brother Quique is here, singing in the duo Radio Cos whose own album was a highlight last year.
There are, of course, gaitas – Budiño, Susana Seivane, Cristina Pato and many more – and pretty much all the other pitched and percussion instruments of Galician tradition, joining the singers or in instrumental tracks from such as Os Cempés and the jew’s-harp duo of Emilio and Daniel Do Pando. The album ends with 87-year-old Pazos de Merexo talking about his life playing the diatonic accordeon – an instrument much less promi- nent in Galician music than in Basque – his husky speech gently enhanced by a waltz he composed, played by his grandson and Kepa.
www.folmusica.com Andrew Cronshaw
MONSTER CEILIDH BAND Charge MCB Recordings MCB003
You get more monster in your ceilidh. Third time out for the ever improving and expand- ing MCB – now with extra-added sample, groove, beat and dub, – Charge evolves their mutant strains to a level where techno begins to push over the trad, not completely but elbow room for folk dance is becoming limit- ed. Vralkada opens up proceedings with that blueprint, almost tweed skirts and Fair Isle sweaters for the first passage. Gradually the computer percussion and twangy samples run it through. On the meat of the album 80s Fer- ret and Anti Gravity heavy electronics and programming surface. Super Mario Smack Down shoves tinny games sound effects into a blender with improvisation and a squeeze- box on helium.
Halfway through, as if almost exhausted by hardware input, Cosmos No 2 is a slow air straight out of a Highland village hall Satur- day night hop. Back into bangin’ territory Gyto makes churning noise and rumble under a fiddle reel; Alien Forces follows a similar gameplan, the weird bleeps and gurgles buoying the fiddle and octave mandolin. Mr G works itself into a real lather, drummer Joseph Truswell (aka Touch) adding rim fire and bullet-shot percussion to an already full- on setting, composed by Carly Blain, Amy Thatcher and er… Mike Scott?!
From the footsteps, whispered endings and spoken intros (“1,2,3 4, off we go…”) much of this would appear to have been done fairly live, there’s even room for the odd dose of crowd holler and OTT applause. Recorded in Newcastle and mixed by bassist David De La Haye – a fine job too, sir – MCB really are one band who are probably best producing their own efforts; only they know where they want to go next. Charge may wear warpaint and come heavily armed, but murder on the dance floor is the last thing on the agenda. Some of us would just love them to conjure a bonus CD of hardcore, down and grungy remixes but, hey, there is wit, depth, exuberance and an enthralling catchiness here which makes this hard to resist.
www.monsterceilidhband.co.uk Simon Jones
DAVID ROTHERAY Answer Ballads Navigator NAVIGATOR086P
The answer song is a tiny, but delicious foot- note in music history. Let’s not forget, after all, that one of the first major country crossover records, It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels by Kitty Wells in 1952, was in essence a feminist riposte to Hank Thompson’s The Wild Side Of Life. What bet- ter way for an embittered former partner or band member scorned to wash dirty linen in public than in song? Some of us are still try- ing to work out what irked Richard Thomp- son so much about Sting to provoke him to write Here Comes Geordie.
A nice but risky idea, then, for David Rotheray – best known as Paul Heaton’s chief henchman in The Beautiful South – to write a whole suite of songs on behalf of those wronged or vilified in classic song history. There are, after all, two sides to every story and who can’t be enthralled by what Julie Murphy – as Jolene – has to say for herself after Dolly Parton famously pleaded to get her claws out of her man? As it happens, Rother- ay’s version of Jolene offers a rather maudlin’, sad, self-pityingly and lonely apology, rather than the bullish, feisty response some of us might have anticipated. Kathryn Williams, on the other hand, sounds rather more bitter and twisted as Sting’s prostitute Roxanne.
In reality, it’s mostly impossible to deci- pher which original songs these tracks are responding to and without titles you’d be hard pressed to guess that Eliza Carthy is
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