reggae
howard.male
Gagner l’argent Francais (which translates as “to earn French money”) begins, like any other West-targeted West African album, with the pitter-patter of tiny congas and some delicately picked kora. But then, two minutes in, a bright stab of reverb-heavy keyboard heralds the entrance of grungy rock guitar and drums. It’s a bold way to open an album in that it may alienate some of the Radio 3 Late Junction world music demographic. But it isn’t the first time Mamani Keita has put before her audience challenging and innovative music. I have particularly fond memories of Electro Bamako, her Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Blondie took 17 years off between 1982 and 1999, and bounced back with the chart-topping single "Maria". Now, refreshed after an eight-year power nap following 2003's The Curse of Blondie, they've returned with their ninth studio album.This would have been a splendid record in 1980, a year which its snappy synth-pop flashbacks seem to want to evoke. In 2011 it's still not bad, though there's a sense that the tracks are compensating with artful studio technology for shortcomings in the writing, and perhaps in Deborah Harry's brittle vocals. Nonetheless, the disc comes roaring out of the blocks Read more ...
joe.muggs
“This is what Ibiza used to be like,” said the man dancing next to me. I've never been to the White Isle, so I have to take his word for it, but he presented a very convincing argument that the commercialisation of dance music's Mediterranean Mecca has led to a polarisation of its crowds towards either ostentatious spending or mindless drunkenness – whereas Barcelona's Sónar Festival attracts more diverse and discerning hedonists focused on music above all. Certainly a good cross-section of people were in attendance for the first day of Sónar. A large number of electronica nerds mingled Read more ...
david.cheal
Until a few weeks ago, I’d never heard of Maverick Sabre. Then I saw his weird potato-face looks and heard his utterly distinctive voice on Later... With Jools Holland, and was intrigued; thus I found myself last night at the Jazz Café in a sold-out crowd at his biggest London headlining gig, and I was impressed. He’s quite something.Maverick Sabre is the stage name of Michael Stafford, a 20-year-old singer, rapper, songwriter and guitarist who was born in Stoke Newington, north London, and raised in County Wexford, Ireland; he claims that he chose his name by going through a thesaurus Read more ...
joe.muggs
This month sees an audacious attempt to showcase British dancehall music, when the Cargo venue in Shoreditch hosts the multi-artist revue Showtime!. The Heatwave collective have brought together vocalists from various UK underground scenes, linked by a strong influence from the high-energy Jamaican sounds of the past 30 or so years. While many of the artists involved have found success in crossover scenes like rave, jungle, grime and garage, the appeal of dancehall itself (also known by the overlapping terms bashment and ragga) has traditionally been restricted to predominantly black Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There are often times when I dislike the smoking ban. Tonight was one such. A few years ago, a gig such as this would have been awash with marijuana smoke and that was as it should be. At a guess I'd suggest the crowd, who range from 16 to 60, or older, and seem thoroughly disparate, all have one thing in common: that they enjoy the odd toke.Such feelings are only accentuated when On-U Sound production don Adrian Sherwood introduces the night with a brief DJ set that fires up the mood with booming reggae pearls such Jeb Loy Nichols's "To be Rich (Should be Crime)" and Peter Tosh's "Babylon Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
To the relief of many an international batsman, there has never been anything to rival the stupendous West Indies teams which bestrode Planet Cricket with intimidating ferocity from the late Seventies into the Nineties. Fire in Babylon is the story of the side that Clive Lloyd built, and the way it became a formidable socio-political force in the Caribbean as well as a sporting global superpower.The interlocking themes of sport, colonialism and the struggle against racial prejudice add up to a celluloid Molotov cocktail, and director Stevan Riley and producers John Battsek and Charles Steel Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterpiece – but it could easily have been a bloody mess. The team-up of Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek is the kind of thing that brings genre purists and scene snobs out in hives: Somerset-born, Australian-resident Pritchard having delved into everything from sensuous ambient jazz to bouncing booty bass, hardcore rave to exotica over his two-decade career, while vocalist and co-producer Steve Spacek formed the highly individualist and criminally under-appreciated techno soul band Spacek at the start of the 2000s. Together they have brought Read more ...
howard.male
As someone brought up on the concise innocent perfection of the pop single, I have to confess I’m a bit of a hard sell when it comes to sprawling instrumentals. They feel like unfinished songs to me; empty landscapes that need figures in them to create context, narrative, or just a focal point to give meaning to the whole. But there have been a few primarily instrumental acts over the years that have convinced me, and the multicultural five-piece Syriana have now joined their ranks.But having said that, it was something of a disappointment that it was only a five-piece that took to the stage Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For 30 years African Head Charge have been ploughing their unique sonic furrow, wandering hazy-dazed around the outer borders of experimental dub and super-mellow sounds. When they first appeared in 1981 on Adrian Sherwood's groundbreaking On-U Sound label there was no equivalent band to compare them to, except some of Brian Eno's global magpie studio excursions, notably My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with David Byrne which provided them with a sonic template.However, led by percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, who's based in Ghana and London these days, they found a wider, if still niche, Read more ...
joe.muggs
There's something about this album that feels as if it's already existed for a long time. Full of post-apocalyptic images of smoke, dust, decay and weakness, and themes of struggling individuals and implacable political forces, it thematically fits with the works of a long line of acts who positioned themselves against the fear of nuclear armageddon and the seemingly immovable Conservative government in the 1980s. Its mix of Caribbean-influenced soundsystem culture and dub poetry with an edgy alternative experimentalism, too, harks back to the post-punk genre collision of Dennis Bovell, On-U Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
BBC Four's Britannia series keeps it simple - it tells the story in a straight line, illustrates it with as much archive material as the budget will allow, and interviews as many key protagonists as it can find. If the subject is strong enough, you'll get a good film out of it.And so it was with the reggae edition (part of the Reggae Britannia season), which took a brisk 90-minute march from reggae's arrival in Britain from Jamaica in the Sixties to the point where it disappeared into Soul II Soul's dub/soul/R&B mixture. They'd rounded up pretty well everybody who ever had a stake in Brit Read more ...