Music Reviews

Reviews

by DJ Seed

Squall 16, Summer 1998, pg. 47.

Headmix Collective - Birthrights

Tape format £5.50 (incl p&p) CD format £8.50 (incl p&p)
45, Golf Drive, Hollingdean, Brighton BN1 7HZ
Cheques payable to ‘Head Mix Collective’

Birthrights is the first full CD release from the much hailed HMC, and in keeping with their bubbling live performances is an upbeat heady brew. Just take a look at this line up will ya. Penny whistles, fiddles, harmonicas, didgeridoos, bagpipes, guitars, banjos, drums, melodicas, flutes and accordians. Phew! Must be some tour bus this posse get around in. Flying musicianship and on-it political lyrics render this fermenting concoction a fezzie folk-funk classic. Mixing up the dance genres in true good time stylee, Head Mix’s bumping performances should be listed as a three line whip in the festival programme. Score the album first and roar yer lungs out as you reel.

* (New Link) Available to listen to on Bandcamp - click here

Max Pashm - Weddings, Bar-mitzvahs & Funerals

CD format £10 from Max
Tel: 01273 278 022

Havin’ it Hebrew style, with rolling percussion, middle eastern melodies and a rollicking Hasidic hard house beat. Meet Max’s passion even halfway and you’ll be bouncing ‘cross the floor, punching the air and shouting ‘Kosher mate! Kosher!”. Catch him at one of his electric gigs and you’ll be gawking at Pashm’s ability to dive from one instrument to another, soloing over the samples with consummate ease. Weddings, Bar-mitzvahs & Funerals is the first CD from Max, a former new Traveller living on sites around Glastonbury. His blending of Hebrew roots with upfront dance beats bears fruit in some of the most imaginative hard house yer likely to come across on any dance floor, whether it be wedding, bar-mitzvah, funeral, circumcision or club.

Sounds From The Acoustic Ground - Compilation

CD format £3 from
Continental Drifts,
Hilton Grove, Hatherley Mews,
Walthamstow, London E17 4QP

Four top tunes from four of the finest. Baghdaddies, Head Mix Collective, Tragik and Tarantism are the creme-de-la-creme of world influenced festival dance music. At three quid you’ve just got to score this salivating opportunity to check these bands. The first three are all reviewed on this page in connection with their own releases so no more need be said. The fourth band, Tarantism, are seriously funky celts, reeling and jigging their way through uplifting funk-folk cruises. Anyone whose had the genuine soulful pleasure to have seen these bands at a fezzie will have found themselves in a full and throbbing tent, the tent pegs straining against lift-off with only partial success.

Theo and Shannon - Seize The Day

Tape format £5
Big Hill Music,
53, Pendragon Park,
Glastonbury, Somerset BA6 9DU

If you like yer music folksy, soothing and yet political, Theo and Shannon’s tunesmithery will go down like an organic potato pie on a cold Winter’s day. When they’re not on one of their extensive tours, this duo live at the bender ‘village’ at Kingshill in Somerset; subject of many a planning struggle covered in previous Squall’s. Their sweet harmonies and gentle melodies belie the hard political realities they articulate. Modern folk music inna soulful style.

Tragic Roundabout - Peggy Cooper

Tape Format.
£5 from Sandy,
24 College Gardens,
Brighton BN2 1HP
Cheques payable to ‘S. Cameron'

Within 10 minutes of putting this tape on, a telephone caller ringing the SQUALL office was demanding to know who the authors were. “Why, it’s the legendary Tragic Roundabout,” the SQUALL bod said just as the Tragic’s Track 2 cover version of ‘The Wombles’ kicked up in the background. “Where do I get hold of a copy and who do I make the cheque for,” he urgently enquired. We never found out why he’d called in the first place. Tragic Roundabout do that to folk.

In the SQUALL office itself, five bods glued to their VDU’s were prised from silent concentration to holler and hop around the office floor. Such is the the intoxicating power of Tragic’s middle eastern, clarinet and banjo fired dance music. Jocularity usurped the serious side of life as the office was temporarily transported to one of the numerous late night Tragic sessions you might discover at an impromptu bar on the more cultural fringes of a festival. Yer journos were havin it all over the office. Excellent musicians, nutters with passion, revelry soaked..... whatever you call em, this Brighton based group don’t mind a bit, they’re away with the drunken fairies, lost in melody and rhythms and thinking of nothing but successfully soliciting your pure merriment.

The Baghdaddies - Last Tango In Babylon

CD Format,
£10 from Continental Drifts,
Hilton Grove, Hatherley Mews,
Walthamstow, London E17 4QP

To a shot of East European gypsy music add a dose of Jewish celebratory Klesmer swing, a sprig of middle eastern melodies, a spoonful of scar beats and copious splashes of funky Jazz and you’ve got the cocktail of revelry and consummate musicianship that is The Baghdaddies. For those who’ve reeled and rolled infront this much loved festival band, ‘Last Tango in Babylon’ came as a welcome succour from the winter blues. Based in Newcastle, the Baghdaddies’ passion for live performances at festivals both large and small, country and urban, has acquired them a reputation for omnipotence. Of all their gigs that I’ve ever come across, I have never yet seen them fail to unite young, old, black, white, well-off and impoverished audiences in one forget-yer-troubles communal rollick. If an observer from outer space found themselves at a Baghdaddies gig, their spaceship debrief would surely conclude that all human beings jump about wearing a grin stretching from one lobe to the other. Essential medicine for homo sapiens everywhere.

Dubmerge - El Dente

Tape format £5,
Dubmerge,
PO Box 12,
Worcester, WR5 1YQ.

Hailing from Worcestershire, Dub-merge are the festival doyens of funky hip-hop. The aca-taca lyric deliveries are simply the most rhythmically tight speed-rapping I’ve heard coming from these shores. El Dente is a more dubby follow up to their excellent Wake Up CD reviewed in issue 14. Brace yerself then for more keenly conscious political observation, pure funk cream bass lines, and roast-crisp drumming. Despite my best intentions, I always miss a thousand good bands at festivals. I never miss Dubmerge however. Funky as fuck... and some might argue funkier still.