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BARGOU 08 Targ Glitterbeat Records GBCD 045
Glitterbeat have come up with the goods once again. A mesmerising combination of traditional Tunisian highland music, sung and played on traditional string and reed instru- ments, combined with drums and a late 1970s Moog synthesiser. The tradition is not com- promised here, it leads and informs the music. This is not Fatboy Slim sampling Camille Yarbrough on Praise You. This is music from one Tunisian village from which the band takes its name, Bargou, and the story of how its performers have given this local music an international language. This is the tradition centre-stage, viewed through a 2016 prism. The music is raw, exciting, pulsat- ing, emotive, trancey, dirty and hypnotic. Because the Moog is monophonic (only plays single notes) it does not get in the way of the music. What it does is reinforce the drums and underpin the music with the meanest bass lines since Jah Wobble played on Death Disco. I would love to hear this at a club – I reckon everyone would hit the dancefloor immediately. Essential listening.
glitterbeat.com Mark T
HÉLÈNE BRUNET & NICOLA HAYES The Inner Indian Seigfried Seigfried17
Nicola is an Aussie fiddler. Starting at a young age she played with a bush band before mov- ing on to Cajun and old-timey groups. Encounters with ex-pat Irish fiddlers led to her moving to Ireland. From there she moved on to Brittany where she started to play in a number of combinations including a fest-noz dance band and in this present duo.
Hélène grew up with Breton traditional music. It was while she was studying flamen- co in Spain that she took to her current instrument, a beautifully toned twelve-string Spanish lute, the laúd.
You get the picture; here is a pair with a broad interest in European or European- derived dance music and that is exactly what this album offers.
Recorded live in front of what sounds like a small but very enthusiastic and support- ive audience, this duo plays tight and power- ful attacks on tunes in a range of genres. Most of the playing is up-tempo and exciting with only a minimum of vocals, so it breaks things up nicely when we get to the exact middle of the eleven tracks and hear a lute solo that starts in a much more sombre and reflective mood.
www.duonhhb.wixsite.com/duohhb Vic Smith ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO
Burn Something Beautiful Fantasy FAN372602
When it comes to alt-country (whatever that is, etc), Alejandro Escovedo is the benchmark. No Depression, the bible of the genre, made him their Artist of the Decade for the 1990s, and the awards have kept rolling in. After some time sidelined by hepatitis he’s been back on form, and this release marks one of the high points of a career that started in punk and continued as a cowpunk pioneer with Rank & File before heading off to solo pastures. Co-written by Escovedo with REM’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey (who also produced), it’s an album that puts its cards on the table with the opening cut, Horizontal, which sounds like Lou Reed in a throw-down with Johnny Cash. There’s plenty of glittering
material, along with a small nod to the New York Dolls (and even possibly the Plimsouls on Sunday Morning Feeling), but this is Escovedo, his voice cracked and wearily beau- tiful, with his own set of redemption songs. There’s incendiary lead guitar work from Kurt Bloch of Seattle’s Fastbacks, and soulful back- ing vocals to fill it all out. From that hard- fisted start to the dreamlike finish of Farewell To The Good Times and Thought I’d Let You Know, this never lets up with its pull on the emotions and the heart. There’s plenty of fire still burning bright in this man.
alejandroescovedo.com Chris Nickson KAUSTISEN PURPPURIPELIMANNIT
Juhlalaulu Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 128
Before JPP, and all that has followed, the best-known Kaustinen band was Purppuripe- limannit. Formed in 1946, by the 1950s it had resolved into the typical Ostrobothnian wed- ding band format of two fiddles, harmonium and bass. Its national popularity in the 1960s and ’70s was largely the result of the tunes written for it by fiddler Konsta Jylhä.
Konsta left in 1974 but the quartet has continued, its line-up now consisting of a new generation of some of the same families. So now it’s fiddlers Janne Rauma and Asko Hanhikoski, Ville Uusitalo on harmonium and bassist Tony Uusitalo.
This album is a great way to hear the classic shapes of Kaustinen fiddle-band music before the big changes in melodic complexity and harmonisation wrought by JPP (who nev- ertheless still play the old tunes for dancing, and their music is saturated in the spirit of them). Today’s band plays these elegantly
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