Jon Lusk presents our occasional round-up of the very best world music releases
Lau’s most recent album Midnight And Closedown ventures further into the post-folk genre they have really made their own on a mixture of songs and tunes. They share with Karine Polwart (see this month’s Choice) a reverence for the natural world, an especial talent for wordsmithery and considerable brogue appeal in the voice of lead singer and guitarist Kris Drever. This time his lyrics seem darker and more personal than usual, while the instrumentals are uncharacteristically understated – which will change in any live performances they give, where melodic templates are opened up for wild flights of improvisation by all three players. Martin Green uses accordion and keyboards to contribute digital beats and shading, while fiddler Aidan O’rourke offers musical commentary and rhythmic counterpoint. (Reveal Records REVEAL078CDX ★★★★★)
South of the border in England, we find Leicester-based protest singer, LGBTQI+ activist and folk singer Grace Petrie, whose debut Queer As Folk is refreshing for the way it puts politics back into folk music. It’s good to hear an artist espousing socialist perspectives without any of the mealy-mouthed apologies that many of Britain’s supposedly left-wing politicians feel they need to make when doing so. Petrie does so by sketching stories rather than hectoring, merging the personal and political seamlessly in her song writing. And her take on Richard Thompson’s ‘Beeswing’ is up there with Christy Moore’s great version. If you want to get the message[s] ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’, then catching one of her feisty gigs is highly recommended. (Grace Petrie GPCD006 ★★★★)
The same goes for New Orleansbased Leyla Mccalla, whose third album The Capitalist Blues is just as political, with lines like ‘If you are poor/people will tell you “Shoo”/a dog is better than you’ in the old Growling Tigerpenned calypso ‘Money Is King’. Elsewhere, she sometimes sings
(and writes) in the Haitian French Creole of her parents, and recruits the Haitian collective Lakou Mizik on the carnival/rara flavoured closing track ‘Settle Down’. She also embraces the traditional jazz of her hometown of New Orleans – even recording the title track in Preservation Hall, as well as venturing into zydeco on ‘Oh, My Love’, plus African American soul music, alongside plenty of blues, of course. ( Jazz Village JV570154 ★★★★★)
A long way further south, Argentinian firebrand La Yegros has been crowned ‘The Queen
Of Nu Cumbia’. Her new album Suelta shows why. It bustles with folkloric and traditional sounds of Argentina and other parts of rural South America, such as the chamame of Misiones province in tropical North Eastern Argentina, where her parents still live, though you might be hard pressed to recognise it under the dense layers of ‘folktronica’ production by King Coya and Eduardo Cabra. (X-ray XRPCD1902 ★★★★★)
Another album likely to please dancing feet is Dur Dur Of
Somalia, the ‘Mogadishu Funk’ originators known as ‘the funkiest band from the Horn of Africa’.
Their fusion of traditional Somali styles with disco, reggae and rock is probably best appreciated by investing in the triple vinyl set rather than buying this compilation in its stripped-down single disc format. You can sometimes see this incredible band perform in London, where members took refuge from war; Somalia’s bittersweet loss is our cultural gain. (Analog Africa AACD 087 ★★★★★)