Nidi D’Arac – Taranta Container

Alessandro Coppola and Elena Floris Womad 2011 Charlton Park  (photo by Dr Biddlecombe)

Album released 2011 – 10 Songs, 40 mins.

The name of this band, Nidi D'Arac, means 'nest of spiders' and they come from Salento, the peninsular that forms the 'heel' of Italy. There is a story about the tarantula spiders in their province. If you were bitten by one, your death was almost certain. Your only chance to live, would be to dance for hours on end and expunge the poison. In the cities, towns and villages of Salento they dance the pizzica. It is elegant, energetic and as with all dancing, life-affirming, if not necessarily life-saving.

The bands that create the music for the pizzica are composed of singers, backed by guitars, violins, accordions and hand-held drums. Nidi D’Arac come from this musical tradition, and they stay pretty true to it. All the elements of the traditional Salentine folk band are intact, but they approach the music like true modernists adding guitars, synths, bass and drums. In doing so they have kept the beautiful and unique qualities of the pizzica, and added the power and excitement of a modern rock band.

Songs such as 'Gocce' begin traditionally with acoustic guitar, and the striking and edgy voice of the band's leader Alessandro Coppola and almost immediately the experimentation begins; electronic pulses, echoing voices and soaring choruses make this one of the most interesting and dynamic songs on the album. This creativity and originality is expressed even more clearly in songs like 'Ipocharia' and 'Cerchio si apre cerchio si stringe'. Even the songs that appear to be in a more traditional folk style, such as 'Ahi tamburieddhu!'  and 'Tarantulae', reflect the desire to do something new, to find a different way to play and to take their music to the world.

Often experimentation can result in musicians creating work that is disengaged and alienating to its intended audience. But not Nidi D'Arac, who grow their outstanding and exciting music in the fertile soil of their own land, not in some alien environment, and thereby retain its unique flavour and integrity. The addition of synthesised sounds, echoing voices, even a rap style of delivery of the vocals on songs such as 'Ronde noe' never hide the fact these are songs firmly rooted in the home land and culture of their creators. 

A song such as 'Sta Musica' perfectly reflects this wonderful combination, the vocals are earthy, stark and beautiful, the violin is emotive and exciting, and the acoustic guitar is used in the traditional rhythmical role. These alone make a perfectly wonderful sound, but the addition of synthesised rhythms, echoing background voices and an instrumental break involving drum, bass and accordion that sounds a little like Massive Attack create something really interesting and exciting.

Bands such as Nidi D'Arac, and Speed Caravan, Bellowhead, La Brass Banda and Tinariwen to name but a few, are taking the forms and styles, the traditional instrumentation and the cultural ethos of their own music and doing something exciting and new with it. Whether that musical culture is Algerian oud playing, English folk, Bavarian oompah or Southern Italian pizzica, the transformation of these traditional forms into something that can have a worldwide appeal while retaining the quality, beauty and intensity of the local folk music is a wonderful thing to witness.

Having seen this band at Womad Charlton Park 2011 and in a little village festival in Spain I can affirm that their live performances fulfil the promise of this thrilling album.

Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes

2011 – 10 Songs, 40 mins

This is Swedish singer Lykke Li’s second album, produced by Björn Yttling and recorded in Sweden, although written in Los Angeles. On it she creates highly original percussive and electronic tones for each track and blends that inventiveness with an obviously heart-felt love of sixties American pop, especially the great teen operas created by Phil Spector and Jack Nitzsche. A love that can also be found in her previous covers of songs like 'Unchained Melody’ and ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’. But Lykke Li is a very original artist and although she borrows from the past, as all artists do, she creates an environment of sound that is new, somewhat scary and deeply personal.

On this album her voice, although very different from either The Ronette’s Ronnie Bennett or The Crystal’s Darlene Love, expresses the same deep yearning and heartfelt passion. While the classic pop essence is distilled into an echoing organ, a stark big beat and the shimmering shake of a tambourine. Her distinctive voice expresses love, loss and pain; dreams, despair and desire in equal measure. The voice fitting perfectly with lyrical themes of depths and heights, of fires burning and rivers running deep and wild, of places we can be together, and times when we are torn apart.
 
The ten songs on the album are:
Youth Knows No Pain – one of the best songs on the album, slightly reminiscent of The Doors, and Ray Manzarek would have been proud of the swirly organ sounds. It has a tribal chanting feel to it and a really great chorus. It’s a powerful and involving tune, intriguing and appealing.

I'll Follow Rivers – The use of African percussive instruments gives this track an interesting dynamic and sets it slightly apart from the rest of the album. She has a lovely tone to her voice on it and appears to be channelling the lyricists of Sixties American teen pop, with rivers running deep and running wild, down which she follows her baby - ‘the rebel’ - into the depths of love.

Love Out of Lust - a little Spector haunts this track also. But in this case the wall of sound is on stage in a rundown half-empty night club. The big drums, bells, handclaps and lovely repeated harmonies all eerily echo the golden era of pop hinting at the Ronettes, the Crystals and the Shirelles. But this is not sparkling sequinned pastels, and high-heeled glamour, it is more intimate and gritty, more personal and complex, and more in tune with modern life and relationships.

Unrequited Love - a slightly more country feel to this song with a twangy guitar sound and plaintiff vocals, reminiscent of the Fleet Foxes in some of the harmonies, a tone perfectly suited to the theme of the denial of love. Although the ‘shoo-wop, shoo-wah’ refrain seems to take us back once more to Saturday night in the diner.

Get Some - a more rocky song, the big drum sound and the slight shuffle reminds me of the Bangles. This is a swaggering song about sex from a twenty-first century woman’s perspective.

Rich Kids Blues – My first impression was of a sophisticated pop song, superbly constructed, very engaging with interesting lyrics and a dynamic energy that makes you want to hear it again immediately. Second listen indicates that it is not one of the best songs on the album, it doesn’t really go anywhere. But second impressions are often wrong.

Sadness is a Blessing - this is a song directly inspired by Spector's Ronettes, it is almost a tribute song, in less careful and caring hands it could slip into kitsch parody. Here Lykke Li's voice retains the pleading, heart-aching seriousness of those original girl groups, carrying torches for wild and crazy boys who treat them bad and leave them sad. The use of slightly odd percussion makes it sound as though it is an old 45rpm single with a big scratch across it, which strangely enough works really well. The lyrics are brilliant; poignant, possibly cheesy, yet at the same time defiant and gutsy. I think this is my favourite song on the album.

I Know Places - this is a little bit nondescript, gentle, with a simple repetitive theme and some nice vocal experimentation. About two-thirds in, it goes off into a somewhat pointless instrumental section that would function nicely as the background music to an early evening drive around Ystad in the Swedish province of Skåne, where Lykke Li was born, and where Henning Mankel set the Wallander stories.

Jerome - the 'big beat' is back again in another tribute song. Pick a boys name, with two syllables and plenty of things it can rhyme with, and write a song about how much you love him and how you will always be together - oh oh Je-rome! But this is a slightly twisted version, the handclaps and beats are a little haunted. It seems like the fascination with this boy may have led Lykke to keep him chained up in her basement, that way he can never leave and she will never lose him.

Silent my Song - a sort of industrial big beat underlies this somewhat disconcerting song -
"You seek pain like it is pleasure", and lots of talk of needles cutting through veins, fists and murder, is a little worrying. The vocal harmonies recall Fleet Foxes again, but the big dramatic harmonic sweeps at the start of each chorus definitely channel the

This album featured in most of the lists of best albums of 2011, deservedly so, and for what it is worth I would definitely recommend it.