We’re on a great run of albums that aren’t just Good but some of the best, and Revolver is certainly keeping that ball up in the air.
When I was little, I was completely obsessed with the Beatles. When I was in Year Two or Three, The Beatles were my ‘thing’. And then I sort of forgot about them. Obviously I knew they were great, and still listened to them occasionally, but it was more taken as read rather than felt. But then about nine years ago, I put Revolver on and it blew my mind all over again. Cue listening to it again and again over the period of a few weeks, and my love for the Beatles fully rekindled.
Every track is perfect in context of the album. Even the obligatory drippy love song (‘Here, There and Everywhere’) and children’s offering (‘Yellow Submarine’) add, rather than subtract, to the album’s overall quality. There are so many moments of out genius on Revolver that it’s easy to forget them. The album has one of the best Beatles guitar solos in ‘Taxman;’ the desperately sad ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ performed only by a double string quartet and voices; George’s most successful Indian experiment in ‘Love You To,’ and one of the group’s earliest forays into musique concrète in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’…and it was released just three years after their strummy-wummy debut. How a group can progress so far in such a short amount of time is nothing short of madness.
(Revolver also gets bonus points for one of the best album names ever, clever in the same way as The Buzzcock’s Spiral Scratch EP.)
John Coltrane (USA) Blue Train (1958)
7 tracks, 59 minutes (2003 CD version) Spotify • iTunes
I’ve already told you a bit about my evolution as a jazz listener, from Louis Jordan’s jump-blues to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, but it was John Coltrane’s Blue Train that cemented my ever-passionate love of that late 50s-mid 60s hard-/post-bop sound. It also readied my ears for the likes of Ornette Coleman, Modern Jazz Quartet and Albert Ayler.
As a sextet, this album has a bigger band than I normally prefer in my jazz nowadays, but come on, who can find fault in Blue Train? It’s an all-star band for one: Lee Morgan on trumpet, Kenny Drew on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums. It also gives a voice to the under-used hard bop instrument, the trombone, as played here by Curtis Fuller. Everyone needs more trombone solos in their life. And then there’s Trane on the top of his game – great, memorable head sections and genre-defining solos.
I have listened through to this album so many times. Every track is a winner, and instantly recognisable. Favourite moments are all over the place, but I can’t really get over the immaculate cool of the title track and that opening solo. I’ve pored over that more times than I can count, in sonic and dot form and it still fills me with wonder. And then there’s ‘A Moment’s Notice’ which makes me feel really Christmassy for some reason, every time without fail (much more than Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s actual carol).
It all comes together so well. Even the cover is exactly in tune with the music – it features Francis Wolff’s iconic photography that defined the Blue Note visual aesthetic showing a Coltrane relaxed but purposeful, cool but intense and ready to let the music flow through him and his horn.
There’s not much more I can say on this one without getting boring in my waxing lyrical. Just listen and worship at the altar of Saint Coltrane and his five hip apostles.
Western classical musicians are known for their virtuosity, but not necessarily their versatility. Kronos Quartet have them both to staggering degrees. Floodplain encapsulates everything that I love about the group. On this album, they delve into the classical styles of three continents, playing compositions from Central Asia, the Balkans, India, across the Arabic world, Turkey, Iran, Ethiopia…the range is staggering.
But Kronos don’t just play music from other cultures on two violins, a viola and a cello by reading some dots from a page. They approach each piece holistically: they work closely with the composers, arrangers or collaborators; they learn about the musical cultures upon which the pieces draw, and they learn about what the pieces mean and the emotions that they evoke; they adapt their playing style to suit each piece, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all Western classical template to everything; they even play specially-adapted or -invented musical instruments to make sure that they convey the pieces in exactly the right ways.
With this meticulousness, the performances on this album are obviously spot on. And that is only right and proper as a show of respect to the twelve pieces on display, all of which, to a one, are absurdly beautiful in their own ways. I could wax lyrical about each one of them. ‘Tèw Semagn Hagèré’ is an arrangement of the celebrated Ethiopian begana lyre player Alèmu Aga, with those aforementioned commissioned instruments echoing the begana’s haunting buzz and Alèmu’s whispered voice. The live performance of ‘Getme, Getme’ with the celebrated Azeri mugham singers Alim and Farghana Qasimov and their ensemble, in which the two classical traditions blend so seamlessly as to feel completely natural. My favourite, ‘Tashweesh,’ written by and performed in collaboration with Palestinian hip-hop/electronica collective Ramallah Underground, which is treated and remixed so heavily that it barely sounds like a string quartet piece at all, but which fits in the collection seemlessly. Or my other favourite, the Lebanese Easter hymn ‘Wa Habibi,’ made famous by the singer Fairuz, which is given a simple arrangement that accentuates the mournfulness of the piece and brings to the fore its connection to both church music and Arabic classical singing. And that’s only four of them.
Floodplain isn’t just an album I enjoy listening to, although I do, and often. It’s more than that. I am in awe of it. The sheer musicianship on display, the outstanding compositions and arrangements, the sensitivity of it all, it all adds up to an album of breath-taking, even heart-breaking beauty. For what it does, I would even go as far as to say that this is a perfect album.
Diamanda Galás (USA) The Singer (1992)
10 tracks, 46 minutes
Another album that doesn’t seem to be easily available for streaming or download in the UK. I found seven of the ten tracks on YouTube, so I’ve stuck them in a playlist for you, but if you want the whole thing, let me know and I’ll sort you out.
Probably the most exciting thing when you’re a music fan is that moment you first hear something of the sort you’ve never heard before but it grabs you immediately – you have no idea what you’re listening to, but you know you love it. Listening to Diamanda Galás for the first time made me feel exactly that way. To be honest, I’m not sure I can even really tell you what it is now, but I can try…
Diamanda Galás’ fingers, when they come into contact with a piano or electric organ, tease out avant-garde jumbles of notes. They’re something like amorphous clouds of sound: heavy on the sustain, sometimes dissonant, and usually favouring the lowest registers of the instrument. But then a blues note will come and go in a swirl. The note comes back again and attaches itself to another, in a cluster. That builds into a lick, and then suddenly she’s playing some of the bluesiest lines while somehow still in that disorientating avant-garde frame. Then comes her voice.
She has the voice of an opera singer trained in hell. She can turn it on a dime, from a powerful, full-chested boom, to paper-thin screeches that would make a blackboard cringe, to menacing, throaty rasp. At times she sounds legitimately possessed. Put that together with her piano, it all sounds positively demonic. If she hits you in the right frame-of-mind, it can be absolutely terrifying.
Like some other things I’ve covered here, The Singer is not an easy listen. It’s uncomfortable and it’s intense and weird and I absolutely love it. This album in particular is a set of blues and gospel standards, played as if they have been percolated through the nine circles. But they lose none of that bluesiness at all. See what I mean by checking out ‘Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?’ It starts off plaintive and creepy, and descends (or, ascends) into operatic shrieks of accusation, the piano keeping the tether in the earthly plains throughout.
I’ve not heard anyone else even approach what Diamanda Galás can do. I don’t even 100% get what she’s doing, but I know she’s doing it exactly right. It’s marvellous stuff, and great music to listen to while you scare the kiddies on Halloween.
Kamel Nitrate (United Kingdom/Portugal) Lost in Spice (2003)
10 tracks, 54 minutes (2019 remastered version) Spotify • iTunes
Kamel Nitrate were, until not too long ago, a group that seemed to come and go in a blink. They had one great album, played around for about a year or two and then seemed to disappear almost completely, save for a couple of remixes here and there. But they left a deep impression on me.
The Kamels as they were then were a bunch of musicians orbiting around the nucleus of producer and multi-instrumentalist Tony Marrison and the excellently named DJ Nelson Dilation. Together with a group of excellent musicians including Portuguese singer Maria João Branco, they created a sound that epitomises dubtronica for me. Not only does it have dub and electronica in heavy doses, but the influences are global. Every continent is represented musically in some way or another, whether as samples that drive the direction of whole tracks, to something as small as a chromatic passing note in an organ solo.
The resulting album, Lost in Spice, is a proper party record, and an annual sound of the summer. Since getting the album in 2003 (or perhaps a little earlier – if memory serves me right, me dad got a hold of an early copy direct from the source), this album was never too far away from my speakers.
It took all the way until 2016 for Kamel Nitrate to rise again, with Tony Marrison rallying some worldwide friends to create the sequel he had always envisioned in the form of Lebanon Elevator. I even got a personal thanks in the album sleeve for the support, too, which was nice.
And then, as a lovely surprise, Lost in Spice came back around – they released a remastered and slightly extended version just earlier this year. The original mixes were lost to the hard drives of time, so Tony had to painstakingly put everything together piece-by-piece and it sounds lovely and sparkly for that. It’s great to get to appreciate it all over again, and I really hope this re-release gets this classic album the wider listenership it always deserved.
Various Artists (USA) Presenting the Alan Lomax Collection (2004)
12 tracks, 46 minutes
This particular compilation wasn’t anywhere to play online, and most of the tracks aren’t on Spotify either. I made a YouTube playlist of most of the tracks for you (the last track wasn’t on there, grrr)
…having said that, all of Alan Lomax’s recordings are now in the public domain, and they’re all searchable and listenable via the Cultural Equity website – thousands of hours of recordings from all over the world, go nuts!
This is a compilation of music recorded by Alan Lomax on three of his journeys across the Deep South of the USA, between the late 40s and 1960. Most of the recordings are from Mississippi, but there’s also some from Virginia, Georgia and Arkansas too. These tracks were chosen because they were the ones that were remixed as part of the Tangle Eye project, where they were mixed up with all sorts of beats and other nu-blues accoutrements. That album is really disappointing. If you want the good stuff, turn to the originals.
Lomax recorded so much material on his southern journeys that the compilers must have been spoilt for choice. As a result, all of the tracks are wonderful. There’s quite a range presented here too, from the delta blues to spirituals to pieces based on English (or possibly Eastern European) folk songs.
The most spine-tingling of them, though, are the ones recorded in the Mississippi State Penetentiary, also known as Parchman Farm (you can see which tracks were recorded where and when on Discogs). Inmates of Parchman Farm were treated in conditions that amounted basically to legalised slavery, and the practice of chain-gangs was still going strong. The songs sang there are heavy with world-weariness. They are work songs and chanties, some even sang in that context, chopping wood, for example. They are beautiful, if haunting – the high-pitched voice of Henry Jimpson Wallace singing ‘No More, My Lord’ is heavenly, but full of sadness.
But then there’s also the very short track, ‘Jim and John’ by the Young family of Ed, Lonnie Young and Lonnie Jr. It’s the only fife-and-drum music included in this collection, and it’s one of my favourite tracks on it. It doesn’t have the aching quality of the chain-gang songs – in fact, it sounds joyous. The fife is just so bluesy, but drums are begging you to dance. Really, I could go through every track on this album and say why I love it.
As tempting as it is, it’s hard to really call this music the roots of the blues – after all, blues was in full swing by this point. In fact, the post-bop era of jazz was already in its prime for most of these, and the British blues boom was starting to come together. But there is something about recording these musicians in their homes – or jails – that captures the real essence of all the different types of folk music that the urban blues styles drew upon. This is music with deep roots, and far-reaching branches.
Michael Jackson (USA) Thriller (1982)
9 tracks, 42 minutes Spotify • iTunes
Well this timing is awkward. Just a few days before writing this one, a new documentary, Leaving Neverland, came out on Channel 4, which details pretty comprehensively the allegations of child sexual assault committed by Michael Jackson. To be honest, we knew for a long time. He was not a good man, and he has that in common with some others that will be on this blog at some point. His reputation deserves to be tarnished with this knowledge forever, but at the same time, his importance and contributions to the world of music is indisputable.
This is a really important time to think about the meaning of legacy, and how much we can continue to revere those of people that have directly caused such suffering. There is a case to say that, if the art isn’t connected with the transgressions of its creator, then it should be excused from being tarred along with the name. This is a flawed argument, especially when it comes to Michael Jackson. For starters, it is because of his music and the popularity, riches and fame that it brought, that gave him the means, the access and the trust of people that was required to abuse children in the way that he did. It doesn’t even work to say that the music itself is innocent of the crime, as the subjects are unrelated – listen to ‘Human Nature’ with this knowledge in mind and try not to be creeped out.
I’m not sure it’s appropriate to talk about this album from a musical perspective at the current time. You know what it sounds like, and you can go and listen to it if you don’t – no-one is stopping you. It’s a great album, but that is less important than the human cost that its success, in part, enabled. It hurts, because I would not have chosen this album to write about if I didn’t think it was worthy, and I didn’t enjoy listening to it. I am sure I will listen to it again, and I’m sure I will gain enjoyment out of that experience. But it isn’t appropriate to write about this album with veneration. Not now, at least.
It’s important that we believe survivors of assault and rape, and it’s important that we don’t let our biases or tastes get in the way of their personal justice.
Gorillaz are one of the biggest bands around nowadays, so it feels a little disingenuous to talk about this album as though you’ve never heard it. I think their other albums have surpassed the debut in terms of popularity, though, so I think this one deserves another look.
I don’t know why, but I still approach this album in the same way as I did when it first came out. It was mysterious. They were referred to as ‘the first virtual band,’ but I think that was just the early 2000s excitement with the internet coming through a bit; what it actually meant was that the band members were basically anonymous, masquerading behind cartoon characters. It was common knowledge that it was fronted by Damon Albarn of Blur, but the rest were unknown (to me, at least). As such, there wasn’t much clue as to what the music was going to be like.
It turns out, it was going to be a lot. It was some mix between alternative rock and hip-hop, but that’s only half of it. There’s lots of trip hop and dub in there, punk and pop occasionally too. And it’s all done so well, no matter where it travels. It even goes to Cuba, with guest vocals from Buena Vista Social Club legend Ibrahim Ferrer.
If I had to pick, I’d say the album is best when it’s straddling the line between hip-hop and trip-hop…but there’s really no point in picking favourite tracks because they are literally all great. ‘Clint Eastwood’ with the great rap from Del Tha Funkee Homosapien obviously stands out and the polyrhythmic indie of ‘5/4’ is really cool, but other less-flashy tracks such as ‘Double Bass’ and ‘Latin Simone’ (with the aforementioned Ferrer) definitely deserve the attention too. And let’s not forget the hidden track, the raga refix of ‘Clint Eastwood’ by Ed Case, which rivals the original and is a great addition to almost any DJ set.
What a perfect debut album. Gorillaz seemed to come basically out of no-where, no-one really knew what it was all about, and the album keeps you guessing as to what’s going to come next. Nothing is what you expect, from start to end, but it’s exciting and enjoyable the whole way through. No wonder they went on to be huge.
The old adage is ‘never judge a book by its cover,’ but book covers serve an important function of enticing you to pick it up and give it a go – they are made to be judged, it’s their whole point. I don’t have a problem with the cover of Blackhouse, it doesn’t particularly stir me either way. But I will admit that I was put off from giving the Peatbog Faeries a go for a long time, just from their band name alone. It’s such a stereotypical name of what I imagine would be a proper crusty, quite bad folk band. I guess it’s supposed to be self-aware in that way, but not Jim-aware, so I wrote them off.
I was wrong. There’s not an inch of crust on them. It is folk music at its very heart, so I got that right at least – most of the tracks are based on self-penned reels and jigs and all that sort of stuff, replete with highland bagpipes, whistles and fiddles. As soon as that first track, ‘Is This Your Son?’ hits the speakers, though, those doubts disappeared. It doesn’t start with wholesome fiddlry or earnest twangitude: it starts with a dirty sawtooth synth wave, some apocalyptic drums and a deadly bassline. This isn’t ale drinkers in kilts with a sideline in toffee and shortbread sales (although they might be some of those things) – this is The Prodigy! Then the fiddles kick and it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Throughout Blackhouse, Peatbog Faeries prove themselves to be like a punkier, less Afro-ish Afro Celt Sound System, with its hard rock and deep electronica elements all undergirded by Celtic melodies and energies. A lot of this wouldn’t be out of place at a cyberpunk night, and it’s sure to get you bouncing. It isn’t as unrelenting as the opening track may have you expect; there’s some gentler pieces scattered here and there with a chill-out vibe. I think I personally would prefer it to keep banging 100% of the time, but the slower tracks aren’t bad and don’t necessarily disrupt the flow – I just like dancing hard when I can.
I’ve had opportunities to see Peatbog Faeries quite a few times over the years at festivals and such, but never took them due to the name thing, and I’ve not managed to see them since. I imagine that they’d be rocking. I’ll have to update you if I ever do catch them live. Until then, remember: judge books by their covers if you must, but don’t be afraid to take a peek inside a dubiously-jacketed one now and again.
Ofra Haza was one of the first world music stars – even before world music existed. In fact, this album was indirectly one of the reasons for the creation of world music as a specific marketing term and strategy. When it was released internationally by the Globe Style record label in 1985, it was a massive success, but so were King Sunny Ade and Les Mysteres de Voix Bulgares, and record shops were having a hard time working out where to put the albums…so, after a fashion, world music became a thing. But I digress. If you want to learn more about that all stuff, it’s brilliantly chronicled on the fRoots website by the editor Ian Anderson.
As for Yemenite Songs, it is, when it all boils down, Israeli pop. And really 80s pop at that: bad synths and gated reverb abound. It wouldn’t be on this blog if that were all it was though. As the title suggests, Haza uses the album to explore her heritage as a Yemenite Jew living in a modern Israel, and the music reflects all of these identities. She sings in Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic and her vocal style changes to reflect the different cultures. The instrumentation is rather orchestral without sounding it: the string, woodwind and brass sections, in conjunction with the synths and the dance beats, end up sounding quite disco-esque. Sometimes the woodwinds take a step forward and make things extra funky, and it all gets quite Bellowheadish on the medley ‘Tzur Mentati/Se'i Yona/Sapri Tama.’ The dhol-soundalike tin drum adds another flavour with its driving beats.
Basically, what I’m saying is that this is pop music inspired by Yemenite heritage and the Arabic culture that goes along with it while also retaining a Hebrew identity and mixing in classical poetry while striving towards all the modern trappings of the 1980s. Now I can see why those record shop owners had a hard time finding the right box to put this in…
One thing I love about this blog is some of the juxtapositions that are thrown up by the random selection. This album and yesterday’s album are not entirely without their similarities, but their soundworlds are absolutely light-years apart.
Soil & “PIMP” Sessions approach jazz with the vigour of a thrash metal band. There isn’t actually any metal in the sound itself, but they play with such wild abandon in contrast to jazz’s usual restrained, tasteful image. They call it ‘death jazz,’ although I’d say it’s much more life-affirming than that implies. After the introductory sound collage contributed by DJ Kentaro, the album hits straight into that stride with the piece ‘Keizoku,’ which won’t half blow those cobwebs away. It’s a million miles an hour and it barely lets up for the rest of the album, and it’s all just pure jazz (maybe with hints of samba and Afrobeat thrown in).
Considering there are only five musicians in the group – trumpet, sax, piano, double bass and drums – they make so much noise, it sounds like there are about 20 of them. And all-acoustic too! A passing listen would convince you that there’s all matter of electronics going on, but nope. It’s all just air, reeds and strings.
There’s also a sixth, key element of the band. Shacho is the bandleader and ‘agitator’ – that means he’s the Bez of the group. His job isn’t musical as such (although he will bellow into a megaphone or hit a cymbal occasionally), as much as it is to just get the band and the audience as riled up as possible and create the perfect atmosphere: a near-riot. As you might imagine, as good as the album is, it just cannot compare to their live show. I’ve only seen them live once, at WOMAD in 2010, but I’m not sure I’ve stopped sweating since. Enjoy this album now – catch them live as soon as you can!
Henry Makobi (Kenya) New Memories (1993)
10 tracks, 40 minutes Spotify • iTunes
Here’s an album to get you through a tough Wednesday. It’s all just Henry Makobi and his acoustic guitar – together they make really lovely, jolly-sounding music to put a smile on your face and a warmth in your chest.
A lot of music from East Africa, taking its cues from Congolese rumba, has a strong Latin influence. In many iterations, such as benga, this influence results in hot dance styles with electric guitars, drum kits and horn sections. Henry, though, takes it another direction. He takes those chord progressions and rhythms from Cuban music, but plays them on the guitar using interlocking patterns inspired by the local Luhya lyre, the litungu. He even emulates the rattling tone of the litungu in the simplest way – he just stuck a bunch of coins into his acoustic guitar. Whatever works! Add in little bits from country music and calypso and you have Henry’s very own style that he called sutuki.
His music is uplifting in the way that it is somehow both perky and gentle at the same time, and there’s something really sweet in the simplicities of his melodies and lyrics (especially the wording of the song ‘Take Me Home and Kiss Me There’). It puts me right into the mindset of a hot summers day, playing in a park or maybe relaxing under a palm tree; it's a guaranteed cheerer-upperer.
Burhan Toprak (Kurdistan/Turkey) Dewrane Dewrane (2014)
5 tracks, 62 minutes
This is a difficult one to talk about, because I’m not sure really where my version of this came from. Well, I do, it was a CD-r in a big box of other CD-rs, but I mean, I don’t think this is a real album, probably more likely to be a sampler. I can’t even find all of the tracks online anywhere. So what I’ll do is send you to a couple of his other albums on Spotify: Dewrane Dewrane (2013) and Daweta Gel, Vol. 1 (2016), and if you want to take a listen to my version, I can send it to you, just let me know.
As you can tell by the vagueness of that introduction, I really don’t know much about Burhan Toprak, or this music in general. As far as I can tell, Burhan and his group Roj Müzik play Kurdish wedding music in Turkey. The repertoire is all based on traditional songs and melodies, but they’ve made it super poppy. That means lots of cheesy synth chords and drum machines. But what I find really enticing about this music is Toprak's electric bağlama. The instrument already has such a lovely sound in its acoustic form, with its double courses of strings, open tuning and microtonal frets; the electric version, played with loads of distortion, adds an extra dimension again.
The recorded work is one thing, but I would love to attend a wedding with this guy. Check out this footage from an event in 2016:
Without all the way-too-cheesy add-ons of the recorded stuff, the ensemble of vocals, electric bağlama and drums is much more exciting, and allows Toprak to show off his skills more too. I’m quite amazed at how civilised the dancing stays to be honest – I reckon I’d be whipped into a frenzy in the right surroundings.
I know that in the past few years, Roj Müzik have been trying to break out onto the international scene, performing in concert settings for world music audiences as well as at Kurdish and Turkish weddings, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be going too well for them. In fact, the only update I can find in English on the web was from 2017, when the group were apparently invited to perform at SXSW but then denied the necessary visas. I really hope that Roj Müzik and Burhan Toprak do end up making some in-roads within the international scene soon. I’d love to see them live – and learn more about them and their music!
Fela Kuti and Afrika 70 (Nigeria) Zombie (1977)
4 tracks, 54 minutes (2001 remastered CD verison) Spotify • iTunes
1977 is the year of punk, but I’d say that Zombie was angrier, harder-hitting and more impactful than any album coming out of that scene in the UK that year.
Fela Kuti is the eternal king of Afrobeat. He created it, and the style has never managed to step out of his shadow after all these years. It’s an intoxicating mix of Yoruba and Afro-Latin rhythms, grooves that find a mid-point between highlife music and the deepest funk and melodies taken from Yoruba traditions, soul and jazz. Most importantly, the very best Afrobeat – Fela’s speciality – is profoundly political.
The title track is the most memorable one here, a true masterpiece. It starts with more than five minutes of instrumental introduction, slowly building up an infectious groove piece-by-piece and introducing wailing solos from Fela on his sax and Tunde Williams on trumpet. If the piece was just this introduction, it would be brilliant just for that. But it carries on into an acidic attack on the military and soldiers’ unwavering obedience, not just in the face of senseless instructions but also senseless politics. The lyrics are on point:
Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go
Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop
Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn
Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think
From about 7:10, it all comes together. There are so many rhythms going on, from the percussion and the drums to the guitars, the horns, Fela’s drill sergeant instructions and the chorus, all playing different rhythms in different cycles creating a hell of a polyrhythm. It’s so much and it’s hypnotic. It ends with a breakdown and another excellent sax solo, unaccompanied this time, with Fela’s typical honking style, leading into a fireworks fanfare. It’s a powerful way to end a track.
Zombie’s influence was felt strongly at the time. It galvanised protestors in Nigeria and across Africa, but also led to severe push-back. The government cracked down on Fela’s compound, his declared independent Kalakuta Republic, which led to its destruction, beatings to Fela and the death of his elderly mother. The album, the song and the vicious reprisals led to riots on multiple occasions. People make angry music all over the world, and 1977 was a hell of a year for it. Punk’s influence is still felt on music today, but when it comes to real stakes and political repercussions, I reckon Fela pipped them all.
Jimmy Smith (USA) The Cat (1964)
8 tracks, 33 minutes Spotify • iTunes
I’m not a fan of big band jazz and orchestral jazz is often quite naff, but when those massed instruments are rallying around someone as cool as Jimmy Smith…well, that’s exactly what The Cat is about.
Having already recorded armfuls of trio and small band releases for Blue Note records in the decade prior to this, Jimmy Smith was already known as a pioneer of the Hammond B-3 organ, and he really solidified the instrument as a tool in the service of the almighty jazz. Then he moved to Verve and started experimenting with larger ensembles, and this is the first time he went with an out-and-out big band, arranged and conducted by Lalo Schifrin.
I reckon it works so well because even though there’s a total of 20 musicians on the record, the way they’re used still feels like a small band set-up. The jazz orchestra plays not quite as one, but as few, and contribute a lot more to the texture and atmosphere than anything else. The focus is still squarely on Smith, and his playing is right on the button with his usual brand of jazz with deep roots in blues and gospel tradition. Schifrin’s band and musical fingerprints also lend everything a very cinematic feel – he was the man behind the Mission Impossible theme, after all, and three of the pieces on the album are directly taken from film soundtracks. When the two styles are brought together as they are here, they actually combine to create a lot of elements that would later crop up in funk.
This is proper music for cool-as-anything action detective films – perhaps with some righteous 1960s kung-fu flair thrown in for good measure. It’s slinky as anything and can pack a proper punch when it wants to. When I listen to The Cat, I want to sneak around streets while making unnecessary dashes between cover and looking around corners dramatically. I might have actually done that once or twice after some slight alcoholic imbibement.
I remain suspicious of big band music – so much of it is just jazz with all of the fun taken out and made nice and non-threatening for white people – but if it has to exist, then do it right. And Jimmy Smith didn’t make a habit of doing things wrong.
By looking at the little (Iran/Cuba) up there, you might be expecting something different. I know I was when I first came across the group. I reckon I was thinking maybe salsa music with tar and daf, perhaps? I’m not sure, but it didn’t sound too promising. But Ariwo are nothing like that.
The band as they appear on this debut album are a trio of Cubans in percussionists Oreste Noda and Hammadi Valdes and jazz trumpeter Yelfris Valdes, together with Iranian producer and electronicist Pouya Ehsaei. When they make music together, it is a pulsating mix of electronica, traditional Afro-Cuban religious music and jazz. It’s downtempo and dark, and dubby in places. It’s very serious in its own way, profound even, but you can tell everyone’s having a great time of it. It all sounds so natural, helped by the ease at which the musicians interact.
Pouya’s drum programming mingles with the Latin percussion so smoothly as to eventually sound like it’s all from one tradition, and the synth-bass and other electronics make a perfect bed for both the jazz trumpet and Afro-Cuban chants. Then, on top of all that, it is all produced and treated with many delays, distortions, reverbs and other sonic refigurements to give everything the necessary amount of space, depth and intensity. It somehow manages to be both danceable and contemplative at once, although there are times where the balance shifts more to one end than the other. For a debut, Ariwo seems like such an accomplished work. There may only be four tracks, but you still get your album’s worth – nothing is rushed, the pieces all develop at their own pace, swelling and diminishing and changing course whenever it’s right but always with the same destination in mind.
Ariwo have their second album, Quasi, coming out next month – in fact, they have just announced today that it will be out on the 15th April. There's some changes: Canadian jazzer Jay Phelps steps into the role as trumpeter, and it also features Binker Golding as a guest on several tracks, who is one of my favourite saxophonists in the UK today. With two years of gigs, festivals and jams all over the world to let their sound percolate, I really can’t wait to hear what they’ve come up with.
There was quite a discussion within world music circles around Staff Benda Bilili. They were a global hit with a fantastically compelling story behind them: a group of musicians left paraplegic from polio, living on the streets of Kinshasa in specially-adapted motor-wheelchairs and practicing their music in the city’s zoo – they were a world music marketeer’s dream. But therein lies the debate: would they have been successful without that story?
Arguably not, but that says more about the problems of ‘world music’ than it does Staff Benda Bilili: they certainly deserved their fame on the strength of their music alone. It’s mostly a mix of Latin-inspired genres such as soukous, played on a bunch of ultra-cool semi-acoustic Socklo guitars (check them out), but whereas that description may bring to mind raucous party music, this album, their debut, is actually really delicate. There are lots of slower, more romantic-sounding pieces together with warm and gentle three-part harmonies and bits of feel-good reggae now and then. They do do party-mode sometimes – especially in live performances – but this record is much sweeter overall than that would suggest.
The real revelation of the album is Roger Landu. When the album was recorded, he was a 17-year-old street kid, playing his home-made and self-invented monochord, the satongé. Made from a paint can, a bent stick and some fishing wire with some jury-rigged amplification, it’s such a singular sound. It’s high-pitched and squeaky, rather bendy in its pitch and even slightly imprecise, but in Roger’s hands it can be the perfect melody instrument, especially when backed by the band’s twangy guitars. In Staff Benda Bilili’s second album, Roger got to show off his singing voice too, which is absolutely lovely, but he leaves vocal duties to his elders, here.
Unfortunately, the band split in 2013 due to internal arguments, paranoia over money and accusations of mismanagement, having made only one more album and conducted a handful of European tours. The group splintered apart into factions, and some of them formed part of the later group Mbongwana Star, but they never managed to reach the heights they’d hit after their first album. As far as I can tell, Roger Landu hasn’t appeared on any other international releases since, but a Facebook search shows that he’s still making music. Maybe we’ll get to hear it one day. I hope so.
This album is mad. It has a weird concept, and it sounds exactly like you’d expect that concept to sound, except, somehow, good. Concept: a Polish folk singer, singing traditional Ukrainian songs with utmost reverence, accompanied by avant-garde jazz double bass, and nothing else. There is absolutely no reason why it should work, but it does.
The singer is Maniucha Bikont, who was taught these songs of Ukrainian village life by three fierce old ladies, Hanna, Halya and Lonia. The women were happy to teach Maniucha as many songs as they knew, but the condition was that she had to be able to perform each one perfectly before being taught the next one – the process took five years in total. Double bassist Ksawery Wójciński is an important figure in jazz and improvisatory music, playing with many top names in Poland as well as creating his own solo work on which he plays all the parts himself.
When I saw them live at WOMEX 17 in Katowice, Poland, their stage presence really accentuated the contrast of styles. Maniucha wore a simple pink dress and alternated between sitting down and singing with hands on hips or clasped in front of her; Ksawery wore the loudest shirt I’ve ever seen, a flowery/tie-dye sort of thing, while he plucked, strummed, bashed, scraped and basically climbed all over his bass when the opportunities arose.
Despite their differences, the two musicians are obviously very much in tune with each other, with enough trust running both ways for each to leave enough space for the other to do their thing. They come together, sometimes in agreement and sometimes in contradiction, and also depart from each other at times, but never in ways that leave the pieces feeling lacking.
I would like to explain really how they make their clash of styles work so well, but I’m not sure I can. Their sounds are worlds away from each other, but maybe this is a case of being so different, that they’ve looped back around and met up again, back to back.
It’s Christmas in March, hurray! The second most happiest time of the year! But it’s okay if you don’t celebrate Christmarch – this album is an evergreen selection of rocking hard bop with a couple of sweet ballads here and there.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (this album was released before he added the first bit) is most well-known for his ability to play multiple saxes at once. It’s impressive, and makes a really unique sound, but up until this album, it was regarded as a gimmick for him to hide behind while still wowing audiences. With We Free Kings, though, he proved that it was merely an extra string to his bow – his chops are in full evidence throughout this album.
Here he plays tenor sax, a modified soprano sax, a straight-bodied alto sax and flute. He solos with all of them at one point or other, but for me, it is his fluting that really stands out. His great innovation of vocalising into the flute while playing has since become the sound of jazz flute, and it’s demonstrated to great aplomb on ‘You Did It, You Did It,’ with bonus ecstatic yelps and barks, which usually has me yelping along in delight too.
On top of it all, though, is the title track. Yes, it based on the Christmas carol ‘We Three Kings,’ but Kirk’s version isn’t Christmassy at all – in fact, it just highlights how jazzy a piece that carol is, and what a shame it is that we’ve confined it to a single month of the year only (see also: ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,’ ‘The Holly and the Ivy,’ ‘The Coventry Carol’). Under Kirk’s direction, it starts mostly true to the version we all know, albeit with a wicked swing, played on flute. But then he switches to soprano where it slowly breaks down into some psychotic, almost-free jazz. It's quite fun to compare it to yesterday's album, actually. We get a little bit of a piano solo and some sax chords as a bit of a breather and return to the flute. The melody comes back, but it’s not quite recovered from the freak-out in the middle and sounds all the better for it. What an amazing track!
It’s quite amazing how anyone could have mistaken Rahsaan Roland Kirk for a pretender with a party trick. He was the real deal, and We Free Kings proves it. Just don’t try to play it at a Christmas party. I made that mistake: it doesn’t go down well.
Hua Family Shawm Band (China) Walking Shrill (2004)
9 tracks, 79 minutes Spotify
Don’t stick this one on if you need a soundtrack to a relaxing evening to tap your toes along to – this is not easy listening. I don’t even really enjoy listening to this, to be honest, apart from maybe in minute-long chunks. Fortunately, this is a blog for Good Albums, not enjoyable ones (it’s all conditioned anyway), and you should definitely give this one at least a listen.
This is chuida music from northern Shanxi province in China. It is ceremonial music that was traditionally used for weddings, funerals, 100th day and 80th birthday celebrations, although now it’s mostly just heard at funerals or 80th birthdays. The ensemble can be made up of many musicians playing sheng (mouth organ), hao (trumpet), mei (flute) and huhu (fiddle), but the most important – and striking – sounds of the ensemble are the two suona and the percussion.
The suona is a shawm with a large bell on the end, making for a very loud, very piercing sound. When played in pairs, both instruments embellish upon the same melody, with the higher-pitched suona (known as the zoujian, ‘walking shrill’ – hence the album name) having the freedom to flourish right at the top of the register. Together with the drums, clashing cymbals and gongs, they get a really intense noise going on. Although it’s all precomposed apart from those flourishes, the way the sounds all combine with each other and the way the rhythm seems to clatter along puts me strongly in mind of the free jazz of Ornette Coleman.
You’ll find much better and more in-depth information about chuida and the music of Shanxi in the work of Dr Stephen Jones. Helpfully, he has a pretty sizable post about the music and the Hua Family Shawm Band themselves over on his own blog, which I would heartily recommend. This is challenging music if you’re coming from a Western frame-of-reference, but it’s definitely worth checking out as an important piece of cultural heritage. And you never know, you may just find your next favourite style.
Tinariwen (Mali) Amassakoul (2003)
11 tracks, 46 minutes YouTube playlist (it’s not 100% perfect, but you’ll get the idea) • Spotify (not in the UK) • Amazon Music
On the very second day of this blog, we talked about Kel Assouf, who I consider to be probably the most exciting band playing Tuareg guitar music at the moment. They bring a fresh, new energy to a fairly crowded marketplace. And – having seen them live again recently, I can confirm, they are brilliant…but can anyone ever live up to the originators? I’m not too sure.
At the beginning there was Tinariwen. Formed in the military barracks of Libya and the refugee camps in southern Algeria by Tuareg musicians with roots in Kidal in the Malian portion of the Sahara, Tinariwen were, by all accounts, the first to take the traditional Tuareg music and play it on electric guitars, adding in ideas from Dire Straits, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley while they were at it. That was back in the 1970s, and the style they created became known as essouf, tishoumaren or simply ‘guitar.’ By the time Tinariwen came to the attention of Western music biz people in the early 2000s, they were already legendary throughout the Sahara. Their first international release came in 2001, but it wasn’t until their second album, Amassakoul, that Tinariwen properly started to receive attention. Then they exploded and the rest is history – they’re one of the biggest African bands of today, commanding audiences well outside of the typical ‘world music’ set, playing huge venues and collaborating with many top artists, as well as spawning many, many imitators and innovators.
I reckon that Amassakoul was the turning point for Tinariwen’s international career, and its quality backs it up. It showcases everything that gave the band such a striking sound when they first started performing in the UK. The loping, camel's-gait rhythms, the droning guitars and the unmistakable and unique way they are played, the sun-baked bluesiness of it all. It is so spacious, and it’s hard not to feel the beating sun and mile upon mile of bare sand completely ingrained within the music. It’s also interesting to hear bits of the band’s music that were eventually left by the wayside, such as the breathy odili flute so evocative of the desert wind. The only thing that the album doesn’t capture is the band’s striking image: between seven and ten towering figures, in long, flowing robes and with their faces almost entirely covered by the iconic tagelmust turban-veils, swaying slightly while the fingers upon their guitars make almost imperceptible movements that result in beautiful sounds.
Tinariwen have gone on to release lots more albums, and to even more critical and commercial success than this one, but Amassakoul, released at the beginning of their international career, is still the one that, for me, perfectly captures everything that made Westerners so crazy for Tuareg music of all sorts, and turned Tinariwen into global stars.
Steve Reich (USA) Octet (1980)
3 tracks, 47 minutes Spotify
If you’ve been reading this blog a little bit already, you’ll understand why Steve Reich is one of my favourite Western classical composers. The technique he is most famous for, and that is demonstrated so excellently on this release, is that of shifting phase: a short melody or other musical idea is repeated over and over, while another version of that idea is played simultaneously but at an ever so slightly different speed, or using a different number of beats, meaning that the patterns of consonances, dissonances and silences change subtly with every repetition. The effect in an ever-evolving journey into the music itself, the sound of the instruments and your own brain, which, in searching for meaning among the musical chaos, conjures intense musical moiré. Endlessly repeating melodies evolving through minute variation? We already know that that’s extremely my bag.
Octet as an album is really successful in capturing Reich’s techniques in some of the most easily understandable but still intensely interesting repertoire. The three pieces that are included here each show off Reich’s phasing in different ways. ‘Music for a Large Ensemble’ uses a familiar orchestra-style set up and includes beautiful and cinematic swells from strings and vibraphones on top of his more standard rhythmically-phased themes. The next is ‘Violin Phase,’ an earlier composition that shows his phasing in a stripped-back form, with literally six beats of melody repeated on three violins that slowly grow further out of sync with each other and back again over the course of 15 minutes. ‘Octet’ (which was later tweaked and entitled ‘Eight Lines’) uses several different melodies to phase in different ways throughout the piece, but which change so slowly as to change almost completely without you really realising it.
Although all three of the pieces on this album are quite intense mathematically, the overall effect is relaxing, and rather mind-altering. I once saw Mr Scruff open a five-hour DJ set at the Beatherder Festival with an almost complete rendition of ‘Music for a Large Ensemble.’ It was unexpected and there was definitely a few sceptical looks around, but it was actually a really effective way of changing people’s headspace for an afternoon of eclectic music in the woods.
Octet is a great way to spend a little less than an hour letting your brain enjoy itself on this mental playground, while you can just relax and enjoy all the mad leaps, flips and turns it comes up with along the way. Who needs mind-altering substances when you can expand your consciousness with just a few repeating violins?
You know the B-52s, and Cosmic Thing has two of their most well-known songs on it in ‘Roam’ and ‘Love Shack.’ The rest of the tracks on the album deserve attention too, especially ‘Junebug’ and ‘Cosmic Thing.’ It’s mad that the album is only from 1989, as their sound is so retro. I’m not sure what sort of retro because there’s bits that could have been pulled directly out of the 60s, 70s, and 80s in there, but their sound is that of a sort of timeless, intergalactic go-go. The group never take any of it too seriously. It’s just a big laugh with a bunch of freaky people and everyone’s welcome to join in and dance.
Importantly, everything about the album – from Fred Schneider’s over-the-top carnival-caller’s patter and partytime lyrics to the groovy technicolor artwork and the cheeky winks that I’m sure everyone involved was giving 80% of the time – it’s all so wonderfully camp. In fact, in my notes I just wrote ‘Camp!’ and I think the exclamation point is important in making that statement.
But for me, this album isn’t about the music (although it is, of course, Good Album quality). It is so indelibly linked to a place and an emotion for me. When I was little, we often used to go on camping holidays at a place called Shell Island on the west coast of Wales. I absolutely loved the times at Shell Island, playing in the sand dunes, going crabbing and rock pooling, skipping stones on the River Artro, bonfires, the whole lot. But to get there, there was first the long (for a little boy) car ride from our house in Cheshire that needed to be endured. For most of the journey, we’d listen to the radio, but there was a certain point on the drive, among the hills of Snowdonia, that FM radio couldn’t reach – that’s where the B-52s come in.
It feels like we only had a small handful of tapes in the car, always the same ones, and it was always the B-52’s Cosmic Thing that was reached for as soon as the radio drifted off into white noise. And because that was always about the same sort of place, the tracks always came at the part of the journey every time. It means that every time I hear the song ‘Love Shack,’ not only do I get filled with the memories of the excitement and restlessness for holidays and the smell of the sea and the feel of the sand on my feet, it also transports me back to a very specific place, on a winding road with a cliff rising up to the right of us. It’s so vivid to me. It means we’re almost there.
So, this is holiday music for me. You should listen to this album and enjoy it – it’s good! – but just know that you won’t be enjoying it as much as a seven-year-old on the way to Shell Island.
Various Artists (Kenya) Luo Roots (1990)
11 tracks, 50 minutes Spotify • iTunes
The Luo are an ethnic group from inland Kenya and Uganda and their roots music is just great. Lucky, then, that that’s what we’re listening to today! It’s the word ‘roots’ that’s important here – it’s probably why they called the album Luo Roots, come to think of it – because this isn’t in the strictest sense traditional music. The music featured here has many elements from the old traditions, especially in the songwriting techniques and instruments used, but the music itself is much faster and takes inspiration from benga music. Benga is a guitar-based style that evolved from Congolese soukous (and before it, Cuban son) when it was played by Luo musicians living in Nairobi. They brought their traditions into the music and, in turn, the traditional Luo musicians adapted their own playing to reflect the popular style that everyone wanted to hear. And that’s what Luo Roots is about.
It’s cool to hear this blend of the traditional-but-modern, or the modern-but-traditional, in this way. The band that is featured on most of the tracks on this album are called the Kapere Jazz Band. Their members play instruments such as the orutu one-stringed fiddle and the nyangile (an amazing contraption that pairs a wooden box, a metal ring and a stick to provide both percussion and bass), and are joined by musicians playing the nyatiti lyre. Their harmonies are wholesome and their rhythms are breakneck. It is interesting that they still refer to themselves as a jazz band. It shows how much they distance themselves from the ‘traditional’ label despite their sound, moving instead towards the lexicography of the upper-class dance bands such as those in the Congo. Only the last track on the album strays from the ‘roots’ sound, instead going full-on benga with Orchestra Nyanza Success with their lovely twinkly electric guitars. This track provides an interesting contrast to the rest of the album, and really helps show how much Luo music has had on benga.
As well as being an album full of great, dancy music, Luo Roots is also handy for reminding us that there isn’t always a stark difference to be made between traditional music and internationally-inspired pop music. Often the influences of each run deep across the spectrum, and even music that sounds deeply traditional can be just as tapped into those international circulations as anything else – and maybe even be just an electric guitar and a drum kit away from being downright pop.
Sex Pistols (United Kingdom) Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977)
12 tracks, 37 minutes Spotify • iTunes
The Sex Pistols and Never Mind the Bollocks… have already been the inspiration for hundreds of thousands of words, and I doubt I’ll be able to add anything particularly enlightening to them, so I’ll try to keep it short today.
Although the ‘point’ of punk and its DIY attitude was that musical skill was entirely optional – anyone could be in a punk band, all you needed was the right attitude and something to make noise with – the Sex Pistols could actually play. On the recordings, at least; Sid Vicious was so bad at playing bass that they actually omitted him from all but one of the tracks. The album itself, though, has well-played music that still sounds fresh and exciting today, powered by the sarcasm-driven shouting of Johnny Rotten that takes centre stage without just sounding pathetic, which it might have done in another setting. Instead, it’s a great reflection of almost-aimless juvenile rage that explodes out of your speakers.
This must surely be one of the most important albums in history. It’s almost clichéd to state how influential it was at the time, and continues to be. The most famous songs such as ‘Anarchy in the UK,’ ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’ still hit with a sting after all these years, let alone the more often forgotten album tracks such as ‘Liar’ and ‘Holidays in the Sun.’ Riffs like the ones on this album can still be heard in the music of hundreds of bands across the world. You don’t even have to look that hard, there’s probably one playing in a pub near you tonight. But just because it’s a cliché to say it, doesn’t stop it from being a bloody good record.
Oumou Sangaré is known as ‘The Songbird of Wasulu,’ and for good reason. Hers is a voice with such an awesome power and utter majesty. My heart leaps every time I hear Oumou sing, and I’m not the only one – she’s one of the biggest names in Malian music, both at home and abroad. Oumou’s style is wassoulou (named after the Wasulu region of Mali – it’s a subeditor’s nightmare), a style based on the sacred music of the hunters that was turned into a pop music by the youth of the 60s, using the signature sound of the kamelengoni bridge-harp. Oumou has revolutionised the style throughout her career, but on Moussolou (Women), her debut album, her sound was far rootiser.
The album was recorded in Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire to put out as a tape for the local market in Mali. The album sold over 200,000 copies and made Oumou a star; it was this attention, together with a recommendation from Ali Farka Touré, that led to the album being released internationally by World Circuit Records. It’s a short one at just over half an hour and only six tracks long, but it’s all there needs to be to make a really well-crafted piece. The ensemble is also quite small – that’s where the rootsy sound comes in: it’s just kamelengoni, guitar, bass and violin, and with a couple of backing singers. The violin – played by Aliou Traoré – is an interesting addition to the style. It switches between a more American style such as would be found in country music and a most definitely West African sound that imitates the one-stringed soku fiddle.
The proper highlight, it almost goes without saying, is Oumou’s voice. It’s indescribable, really. You’ll just have to listen and find it out for yourself. I will do a bit of name-dropping here, though: of all the musicians I have interviewed, Oumou Sangaré may just have been the most thrilling. When I asked what song she sang when she entered a competition as a six-year-old, the title didn’t come to her straight away, so she sang a short refrain of it to jog her memory. This was as she was just putting on her make up backstage before a show, but the sound that came out of her mouth was from another dimension, it was so beautiful. Just imagine what it sounds like when she tries.
Moussolou was recently remastered and reissued in 2016 – that’s the version that’s on Spotify and everything (and that's the cover, above left) – and as a download it’s really cheap at only £5. There’s really not much excuse not to dig into this record that made a superstar.
Writing this blog has made me realise how little I know about a lot of the music I love. This album is a good example, I think. I really like the music it contains, but I’m not sure I have enough of the correct vocabulary or knowledge of the style’s history to talk about it in the depth it deserves. I just have to talk about what it means to me, and why I love it so much – hopefully you’ll agree, and if you know more than I do, I always love to be corrected and educated!
This is dubstep from before it became a clichéd pop add-on: for a while, it felt like any pop song with a wobbly bass was classed as dubstep (I guess it’s like when any music with an acoustic guitar is called ‘folk’). But the style is much more than a bass synth with an LFO stuck on it. To me, dubstep is just dub without the reggae. It uses all of the same production qualities as the Jamaican style, but approaches them from a different direction, one informed by drum and bass, instrumental hip-hop and techno. Like dub, it takes these faster, dance-focused styles and turns the attention to the sounds themselves. Not that the focus shifts from dancing, of course, but this is more often a slower, more spacious groove. It’s darker than dub too, although in a way I can’t really describe – it feels a little dingy, in a good way.
This particular double album is from the Dubstep Allstars series, which saw eleven volumes between 2004 and 2013, showcasing the breadth of the style with a load of guest DJs on the mix. This one, Vol. 04, is mixed by Hatcha on Disc 1 and Youngsta on Disc 2. I like mix compilations, as they really give you the opportunity to revel in the vibe without having to take breaks at the end of the tracks: they’re basically ready-made club nights with only good music – score! On the whole, I think I prefer Hatcha’s contributions on this one, as his selections are more chilled-out and open. Great for very late nights.
Once again, this is a type of music that I’d love to hear more of and learn more about. Judging by the quality of these two mixes, I guess the place for me to start would be the other ten editions of the series!
The album by Shnabubula from the other day wasn’t a video game soundtrack, and neither is this one, although you might mistake it for one. Instead, it’s the soundtrack to a webcomic, one of the most famous there has been, actually. I can’t think of any other webcomic that has a soundtrack, but then again, this isn’t any other webcomic.
Homestuck was written and drawn by Andrew Hussie, and the plot starts with a bunch of friends acquiring a new video game and spirals out of control from there. It’s an epic adventure in terms of both the story and the length. Not only does the plot grow increasingly more outlandish and complex, but so does the comic itself: it starts as single panels with a short subtitle, and expands to includes gifs, Flash animations, side projects, games, textlogs, interesting bits of URL-fu and more – so of course it would have a soundtrack. The style of the comic is in the manner of an old-school illustrated text adventure video game, and the music it includes is in keeping with that style. It makes sense that the music is just as in-keeping. This album is a collection of the music featured in the first four acts of the comic.
Because there are a bunch of different composer-performers on the album – the material was written separately by a community of twelve fans – there is a variety of approaches to musicifying Hussie’s adventure. The music stretches from straight-up 8- and 16-bit programming that could be direct from the NES or SNES, to touching solo pieces on piano or violin and grand classical-style pieces. There’s also some plain mad shit, like a dirging lament sang (?) entirely by cats. All of it has a creepy and foreboding atmosphere, which echoes that of the comic, but there’s also more than enough to make you laugh in there too. Like many soundtracks, motifs are used throughout that pertain to certain situations or characters; it means that, when you listen to this album from start to finish, it evolves and grows, making it a rewarding listen on its own without any knowledge of the source work.
The highlight of the album comes right at the end, in the form of a piece called ‘Black,’ written by Toby 'Radiation' Fox*. I used the word ‘epic’ before, and that is extremely appropriate for this one. Here, I'll attach the video:
It’s a perfect culmination of the whole album. It’s dark, it’s funky and it uses General MIDI in a way that I’ve rarely heard paralleled. The sounds of General MIDI are quite crap reproductions of real instruments, but here they are used in their own right, turning their uncanny-valleyness into a strength: my favourite is a saxophone sound that is warped to play so fast, exceed the normal range above and below, make pitch-bends and even chords as to be wildly inhuman. Together with 8-bit sounds, synthesisers, pianos and even a sample from by 1910s vaudeville star Eddie Morton, this is a right headbanger that brings in so many references from the history of video game music to create a masterpiece.
I have to admit, with regret, that I’ve never been able to finish reading Homestuck. I’ve tried starting it from the beginning twice, but both time I’ve gotten, well, ‘stuck’ at the same sort of point and just haven’t been able to push past it. It’s a shame because I really enjoy it. Maybe I should try again…at least I know that there will be much more great music in store for me.
*Really interesting thing I found out just on proofreading: this is the same Toby Fox that went on to create (and compose) the game Undertale, which has been a massive hit over the last few years, and another game with an excellent soundtrack. Cool!
Various Artists (South Africa) Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music from South Africa (2010)
12 tracks, 65 minutes Spotify • iTunes
Despite how I love so much of the music from the African continent, I have a hard time with South African music. I do try, but a lot of it just doesn’t hit my ears right. I find a lot of it to be just a bit too fluffy – I don’t know why and I can’t even really define what I mean by ‘fluffy.’ It's something to do with the way the melodies and harmonies are constructed that just doesn’t work for me. Entirely my problem, of course, there’s nothing about South African music that’s bad in general, I’m just weird like that. So when I find music from South Africa that hits me right, I’m always stoked to dive in; I feel like that about Shangaan Electro.
Shangaan Electro is a scene that revolves around the Limpopo region of South Africa, but it’s spread all over the country. The style is named after the Shangaan people of that region and the music and dance is inspired by their traditional culture. In the Electro version, though, everything is pushed to 11: where Shangaan music is fast, Shangaan Electro is faster; where Shangaan dances are energetic, Shangaan Electro dances are frenetic and completely wild.
It’s all based around drum machines and synthesisers with a range of brilliantly tacky timbres. There’s a particular focus on marimba sounds that hark back to the traditional styles, and the vocals over the top of it all can reflect anything from traditional song to soul, R’n’B and hip-hop. Every track has those short, circular melodies and heavy drum patterns that I seem to love so much, the ones that feel like they could go on for hours. It reminds me quite a bit of mchiriku music from Tanzania, like we heard from Jagwa Music in January – the aesthetics are similar but they’re approached from a different sort of direction, and there’s a little more of a conscious production element with Shangaan Electro. Every aspect of the music is precision engineered to make it the danciest possible, and personally I find it wonderful to exercise to, for the same reason – it never stops, so you don’t want to either.
I know I’ve not really talked about this album in particular, but that's a testament to it. Released on the Honest Jon’s label, the album is a compilation of Shangaan Electro hits, and it was the first time the style got any real exposure in Europe. It’s basically a sampler, a who’s-who of the stars of the genre. The compilers did a great job at introducing the style and its different facets in one succinct album, and it really makes you feel clued-in in just over an hour, simply by listening. So if what I wrote up there sounds at all interesting to you, let this album be your first port-of-call.
Country music can be many things, from deeply traditional to almost parodically cheesy and pop-inflected, but wherever it is on the spectrum, the best of it (for me) evokes a very specific emotion: a soft, wistful melancholy, similar to the Lusospherical concept of saudade. This album by Jolie Holland captures that emotion perfectly.
She has a really beautiful voice that she shows off brilliantly here. Gentle but slightly reedy with a really strong Texan accent and a fragile vibrato that she uses very sparingly but always in the right places – it absolutely melts me. As an album, Escondida is mostly in the country realm, but there are blueses and elements of hot jazz in there too, which allows it to go nicely off-kilter sometimes. Wherever she takes it, it’s always with a calm that’s almost lazy in the most agreeable way, but that doesn’t stop her making some interestingly angular and jazzy melodies to her own compositions.
My favourite tracks are two traditionals that Jolie makes her own in different ways. The first, ‘Old Fashioned Morphine,’ is a take on the spiritual and blues standard ‘Old Time Religion’ with lyrics changed to reflect the different rumination. The song is slow, the feel is cool and the melody is lovely, but it becomes extra special when the horns come in. The trumpet and soprano sax weave slinkily in, out and around the layers of the piece, intertwining with each other and Jolie’s voice. It makes for some really interesting comings-together and movings-apart and puts me in mind of C.W. Stoneking at his best.
The other is ‘Mad Tom of Bedlam,' a traditional English folk song. It’s quite popular, so I’d heard it a few times on the London folk circuit before listening to this version, and sang it a couple of times in floor spots myself, too. Now Jolie’s broken it for me. Her version is fast, accompanied only by a trap kit played with brushes and it is so bluesy. She’s not changed it from the English version that much, just a few tweaks to the rhythm here and there, and a few bends to the pitches at the correct moments and that’s it – I can never hear or sing it the same way again. It’s a blues piece now. It just never knew it until Jolie Holland got her voice around it.
Country music is a style that I really enjoy listening to, but I feel like my knowledge base is never as broad as it should be. This is an album I really dig, so if you have any ‘If you like this, then try…’ suggestions, please do chuck them my way. I’m all ears!
