Tag: gypsy music

Karen Grace – Bitter Sweet (avant-folk)

I’m sure that Karen Grace thinks she’s just writing songs about the things that matter to her, and recording them in the way that suits them best. There’s a whole world of acoustic singer-songwriters out there, all doing that, and a frightening number of them do it really well. Doing it really well is not enough to make it outstanding however, or even, unless you happen to have a personal connection to the artist, worth listening to at all – because however particular it is in detail, in almost all cases that particularity is paradoxically generic. So what is worth your time in this brave new world of saturated exposure, of …

Various Artists – Album Roundup

Blood has a bad rep, but it’s honestly a good thing; there’s blood all over Shall We Live Forever? Blood and darkness. The hot blood of life and passion; the welcoming dark of all-night celebration and vodka-induced blindness… I’m pretty certain the answer to the question posed in the title is ‘no, so what are we waiting for?’ This is communal gypsy folk, with equal parts groove and lyricism (and great playing), a life-affirming panegyric to the sacred pain and hedonism of life. Some tunes are also on the earlier Budmo!, but get it anyway. It’s impossible not to like.

Review Of The Year 2012, Part 1: 12 Albums

It’s that time of year again, the nights drawing in, the pointless over-consumption going into overdrive, and the music bloggers arranging releases into spurious hierarchies of how hip they think they make them look. Well, let me issue the same caveats I always do: I don’t claim that these are the best albums of the year, simply that they are the ones I like the most out of the ones I happen to have heard. There are lots of famous records I happen not to have heard, some of which I might think were fantastic if I did hear them, but quite honestly I haven’t had time in the past year to hear any more music than I have, and I consider it infinitely preferable to stumble across music organically than to be guided to it just because it’s famous …

Asgeir & Mo – Danza de Andalucia (Flamenco fusion)

Flamenco is a music that lends itself to fusions, and that has been successfully fused in many different contexts, but it is also the site of a pronounced ideology of purism. The kind of cultural essentialism that has afflicted British folk music, or the blues, is still probably still the norm in Andalucia: this is not to say that Flamenco’s practitioners are unwelcoming to outsiders, but they are expected to come as respectful supplicants to the tradition, and those that skirt its fringes are clearly aware of this. I’ve heard Gabriela Quintero at a concert, sounding positively anxious to disavow any claim to the name of Flamenco, on the grounds that ‘those guys will go fucking mental’. There are reasons for this purism, beyond the usual ethnic insecurities …

Juana Ghani – Budmo! (gypsy/ folk)

Juana Ghani play central European gypsy music (as far as I can tell, I’m no expert). They are a large band, incorporating a variety of instruments, some plucked, some struck, some blown and some squeezed. The songs collected here are driven along by a tightly and propulsively played brass bass (although on their website only a double bass player is credited), and are virtually exploding with irrepressible, celebratory energy. The band rolls a long with a bright, off-beat groove, although they are more than capable of lyrical atmospherics at slower tempos…