Rob Smith & Ray Mighty are truly the unsung heroes of British bass music. Coming out of the same cultural melting pot in Bristol that gave us Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and mega-producer Nellee Hooper, they looked to be among the city's big successes when they first emerged in 1987.
Enough hyping! This month, without further ado, let’s head straight to the reviews…
VINYL OF THE MONTH
LOR Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (Lo Records)
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
Baxter Dury, Etienne de Crécy and Delilah Holliday - B.E.D. ★★★★★ A small but perfectly sleazy work of sweary, cynical brilliance
The first significant British film to explore the influence of Jamaican sound systems in London was Babylon. Shot in 1980, its street patois was deemed impenetrable enough to merit subtitles. Times change. Yardie revisits the same world and era – it is bookended by heaving get-togethers in which sound systems pulse and throb.
He's known for his myriad collaborations – Public Image Ltd, Primal Scream, The Orb, The Edge, Can, all the way through to recent work with singers PJ Higgins and Hollie Cook – but Jah Wobble really deserves attention in his own right. A cosmic Cockney of immense erudition, he has created some extraordinary fusions of global sounds, ambient, electronica, post-punk and more.
Here to be Heard, made by US film-maker and punk rocker William E Badgley, has such a juicy, pertinent story to tell that it never palls. Over 84 minutes, contemporary interviews and old footage build a two act drama that reveals The Slits to be one of the most underrated bands of their era.
Young Echo is a sprawling Bristolian collective, comprised of individual musicians Jabu, Vessel, Kahn, Neek, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Manonmars, Bogues, Rider Shafique, chester giles [sic] and Jasmine, who combine and re-combine in various permutations like Bandulu, FuckPunk, O$VMV$M, Gorgon Sound and ASDA. But here, for the second time in album format, they've put everything together under the one name and allowed it to blur together into something that is, frankly, very, very Bristol indeed.
With December upon us theartsdesk on Vinyl has been kept busy with sacks full of fantastic plastic, so much so that we’re saving the poppier stuff for a pre-Christmas blow-out in a week’s time, so watch out for that.
Disc of the Day reviews new albums, week in, week out, all year. Below are the albums to which our writers awarded five stars. Click on any one of them to find out why.
SIMPLY THE BEST: THEARTSDESK'S FIVE-STAR REVIEWS OF 2017
Alan Broadbent: Developing Story ★★★★★ The pianist's orchestral magnum opus is packed with extraordinary things
It’s impossible to discuss TootArd without digging into the history of their region. They’re a funky desert blues outfit but they don’t derive from Saharan Africa; they were born and raised in the village of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights. This is the region Israel grabbed off Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, then fully annexed in 1981, claiming it as Israeli territory. However, Arabic Syrians who remained were rendered stateless, given “Laisser-Passer” travel papers by the Israeli government rather than the passports of a full citizen. Hence the album’s title.
The band, currently consisting of Nakhleh brothers Hasan and Rami (vocals/guitar/bass/percussion) and saxophonist Amr Mdah, are now based in Europe. They originally came together as a reggae covers outfit and there’s certainly a rolling dub feel to some of their music, but their first album to receive international release has more in common with the likes of Tinariwen and Tamikrest, as is made clear from the festival-rockin’ explosive opening title track, protesting their statelessness in song.
These musicians are also marinated in Arabic classical and western pop, which adds up to an approachable sound. They’re kind of a jam-band but with the discipline to keep things tight, percussion bubbling to the surface on cuts such as “Sahra” and the droning, propulsive “Bayati Blues”. Wind instrumentation swoops in and out, giving a rich sense of Middle Eastern jazziness. TootArd are equally capable of mellow numbers, stoned-out widescreen affairs that do, indeed, summon up the desert, as on the melancholic closing instrumental “Syrian Blues” or “A’sfur”, which bears a passing resemblance to Hans Zimmer’s iconic music for the film Thelma and Louise.
Because it’s not sung in English the politics of Laisser-Passer are implicit rather than battering at the average listener. However, TootArd’s way with a groove is compulsive and liable to drag listeners bobbing and dancing unforced into their musical world.
Overleaf: Listen to the title track of TootArd's "Laisser Passer"