f58 LAU


Decade: The Best Of Lau 2007-2017 LAU2017CDX


“The Best Of Lau”? Pity the poor compiler of this one. I mean… everything they touch is brilliant, isn’t it?


Well, they’ve chosen it themselves so you imagine personal pride and sense of achieve- ment comes into play as they move from Kris Drever’s quietly profound delivery of The Unquiet Grave from first album Lightweights & Gentlemen, through the full box of tricks so boldly explored on the three subsequent stu- dio albums.


The virtuosity of Drever, Martin Green and Aidan O’Rourke is long taken as read, of course, but it’s the adventure, enterprise, imagination and daring of what they achieve with guitar, accordeon, fiddle and visionary electronic effects that make them such an innovative force. Thus they take us on an inspirational journey through the purest fiddle tunes to evocative soundscapes, thundering climaxes and startling tangents and diver- sions – the flaming Lang Set to the implausi- bly beautiful Horizontigo to the grungey Far From Portland to the epic Ghosts, another magnificent Drever vocal wrapped up in what should be the theme for a film noir classic.


Georgia Lewis GEORGIA LEWIS


The Bird Who Sings Freedom RootBeat Records RBRCD37


Georgia Lewis won the 2015 Bromyard Festi- val ‘Future Of Young Folk’ award and she has already packed in a nicely diverse range of projects into her musical CV, touring and recording with prog-rock band, Maschine and performing regularly with The Causeway Céilí Band as well as with her own trio, where Felix Miller (guitar) and Rowan Piggott (fid- dle) have been accompanying her on vocals and accordeon for the past five years.


The Bird Who Sings Freedom is Georgia


Lewis’s debut album. Joining the regular trio are Tom Sweeney on double bass and Evan Carson on percussion. As well as thoughtful and innovative interpretations of traditional folk songs like Raggle Taggle Gypsies and Wife Of Usher’s Well, Lewis takes an inventive approach to sourcing other material. The title track, and album opener, is based on the words of poet and civil rights activist, Dr Maya Angelou, set to music by Seaford singer, Jerry Jordan, and covered by Lewis. Meanwhile, on True Lover she has a stab at setting an AE Houseman poem to music, with some pleasing results.


Until One Day, inspired by the forced separation of her great-grandparents during the War, is Lewis’s one wholly original compo- sition and shows promise as a songwriter in both lyrics and melody.


It is also worth listening out for the fiddle contributions of Rowan Piggott, another rising star of the folk scene who has his own debut solo album out shortly. Piggott plays some suitably authentic-sounding traditional Swedish fiddle accompaniment on his own composition on the album: A Royal Game/ Kungsleden.


A delicately expressive voice, Lewis’s final song, the murder ballad Lady Diamond, very much put me in mind of the way Sandy Denny might have approached and re-interpreted a traditional ballad like this. And that has got to be a huge recommendation from my point of view. An album worth checking out and a name worth keeping an eye on.


www.georgialewis.co.uk Darren Johnson


NISHTIMAN PROJECT Kobane Accords Croisés AC 164


The Nishtiman Project is Kurdistan’s first major transnational ensemble. While their chosen name means ‘the homeland’ in Kurdish, it is likewise the title of a long poem by the Kur- dish poet Bachtyar Ali published in 1983. This sextet’s members come from Iran, Iraq and Turkey – three of the four nations in the region with substantial Kurdish populations. With Sohrab Pournazeri as their artistic direc- tor-composer and playing kemancheh (stick fiddle) and tanbur (a long-necked stringed instrument), the line-up is completed by its female vocalist Donya Kamali, Ertan Tekin on zirna (shawm), balaban and duduk (both dou- ble-reeded wind instruments), Mayar Toreihi on santur (hammered dulcimer) and percus- sionists Robin Vassy and Hussein Zahawy.


It was through seeing Nishtiman live at


the Glatt&Verkehrt festival at Krems an der Donau in Austria in 2014 that their true power first communicated and converted. What also came across was the sheer beauty and potential epic scale of this music. This album has that in spades. It is an advance on the then-septet’s 2013 debut for the same label. A useful starting point for getting an impression of the sheer sweep of their music nowadays is the seventh track. Featuring Donya Kamali, this is a radio edit of the title track – a reprise at seconds under four minutes of the opening ten-minute cut. In fact three of the nine tracks are radio edits of longer tracks, which doesn’t detract in the least.


Kobane, the inspiration for this project’s title, is a city in northern Syria, just south of the Turkish border. Kurdistan is still a state coming into existence, but the Kurdistan of the mind is in strong musical hands with Nish- timan. (To which please add the powerhouse female Kurdish vocalist, Rojda ¸Senses from Turkey’s south-eastern Anatolia Region.) Bertrand Dicale makes a cogent observation in the booklet (typically to Accords Croisés’ high standards): “The modern day destiny of the Kurdish people is at the heart of this album.” To which could be added, Pournazeri and the Nishtiman Project are making freedom strug- gle music in an art music and folk music vein.


www.accords-croises.com Ken Hunt


In ten years they haven’t stopped mov- ing forward, seeking musical horizons beyond the beyond, and anyone who has seen them recently will know they are even more determinedly looking ahead, not back, with an increasingly extraordinary stage show. This collection, you feel, merely marks the end of the beginning rather than the beginning of the end.


lau-music.co.uk Colin Irwin


RICHARD THOMPSON Acoustic Classics II Beeswing BSW015


Quite why nobody ever thought of revisiting their back-catalogue with newly recorded acoustic versions is a complete mystery. The first Acoustic Classics volume appeared in 2014 and hardly scratched the surface of Richard Thompson’s extensive canon. Its four- teen Thompson originals included I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, I Misunderstood and Beeswing (and one co-written song, Persua- sion, with Tim Finn). Three years later along comes the second instalment, again delivered solo and stripped back. It delves and digs into a repertoire that, this turn on the dial, goes back still further with Fairport Convention- era mainstays Meet On The Ledge, Genesis Hall and Crazy Man Michael. None of those three songs (released before he was 21) wilts under the spotlight.


The project’s bare sinew-and-thew approach allows songs to shine and invites re- examination of Thompson’s songcraft, both lyrically (especially) or instrumentally (for example, She Twists The Knife Again). Judg- ing by the first volume (and, proviso, review- ing II from an advance promo copy), what lets the release down is the no-frills, economy packaging, perhaps down to budget or the aim being to preach to the converted. (By comparison Thompson’s 2009 Live Warrior, also on Beeswing, had the classy print spec spot varnish ‘special’.) Works of such imagina- tion as She Twists The Knife Again, A Heart Needs A Home, Pharaoh and Gethsemane cry out for, lyrics, if not liner notes. Acoustic Clas- sics could be still better tickets to Thompson’s magic theatre.


www.proper-records.co.uk Ken Hunt


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