Reissues

Asiatic acid-rock outliers, polemical Afrobeat grooves and UK folk touchstones, Emma Rycroft surveys some of the year’s finest archive trawls

Niningashi

Heavy Way

(Time Capsule)

Japanese folk meets US acid, folk and rock. Heavy Way is, tragically, the only album Niningashi ever recorded. According to the liner notes, it was written at a time when bandleader Kazuhisa Okubo and the Japanese population more broadly found themselves torn between the temptations of the quiet country and the excitement of the city. The softer, bucolic strains of ‘Semai Boku No Heyade (In My Small Room)’ certainly indicate an inclination towards the pastoral. It features honky-tonk harmonica, rudimentary percussion, plonking piano, the creak of a door and the shout of a band member. Okubo sings steadily, his warm voice accentuated by a soft harmony. ‘Natsu (Summer)’ and ‘Hitoribotchi (On My Own)’ are similarly calm takes, with a traditional Japanese folk sound laced through and between the Woodstock aesthetic. Then there are the more hardcore numbers: ‘Chikan No Uta (The Molester Song)’, introduced by a searing electric guitar riff, features Okubo’s voice screaming through the mic in a satisfying burst of rage. A one-off recording to be treasured.

The Lijadu Sisters

Horizon Unlimited

(Numero Group)

The Lijadu Sisters were at the height of their fame, breaking out from Nigeria onto the international scene when they released Horizon Unlimited in 1979. Afrobeat rhythms, funky basslines and soulful keys form the backdrop for the twin sisters’ tightly synced voices and strident calls for justice – just like Fela, Kehinde and Taiwo Lijadu found music and politics inextricably entwined. The siblings’ musical talent and forthright messaging, as well as their familial chemistry, made a potent mix that dominated a male-centred industry and highly deserves the recognition of this reissue. What’s more, it’s filled with absolute belters. Turn up ‘Orere-Elejigbo’ or ‘Gbowo Mi’ (with its ferocious talking drum intro) and try not to sing along.

Martin Carthy

Martin Carthy

(Topic Records)

A cornerstone for trad-inclined listeners and performers alike, this 1965 eponymous debut marks the beginnings of Carthy’s legacy as a British folk hero. Though he went on to release dozens more records – both solo and alongside his family, The Watersons, as well as with Steeleye Span – this remains his favourite. The subtle fiddle playing of Dave Swarbrick accompanies Carthy’s strong, forthright voice and acoustic guitar playing as he runs confidently through 14 raw, essential cuts, including the classic ‘Scarborough Fair’ and marching ‘High Germany’, in which Carthy shows off the melodic capabilities of his voice. ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’, with heart-rending loss at its core, is a particular highlight.

Compilations

A wild ride of musical compendiums full of Kentucky sermonising, cutting loose in Kinshasa and exploring the wildest musical minds of Kyiv

Various Artists

I’m Glad About It: The Legacy of Gospel Music in Louisville

(Louisville Story Program)

‘Who cares about secular music when we got ten Aretha Franklins in every church and I can hear them for free every Sunday morning?’ writes Ben Jones in the liner notes to this astonishing collection of gospel music recorded in Louisville, Kentucky between 1958 and 1981. Across 57 tracks, or 27 on the double vinyl version, Louisville Story Program highlight the sheer variety, joy and God-loving spectacle of gospel music, with many tracks by artists unknown outside of their state. With stunning, personal and authoritative liner notes, this is clearly a labour of love and a reminder of the glorious music being made outside of the music industry’s machinations.
RUSS SLATER JOHNSON

Various Artists

Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996

(Light in the Attic)

Even the Forest Hums illustrates the importance of compilations as it works to chronicle, catalogue and archive the Ukrainian history of recorded experimental music between 1971 and 1996. With a chronological track list, its opening tracks showcase groups from the psychedelic era that first dared to venture into experimental territory, fusing Western dance music with traditional Ukrainian elements. By the record’s final tracks, the listener hears some of the first ambient, EDM and neoclassical works to emerge from the nation’s vibrant scene. Facing rigid repression and censorship from the Soviet occupation, much of this recorded history has sadly been lost to time. Collected on this record are 18 tracks that survived despite the odds and serve to recount this untold history to the world today. NIKOLAS-KAAN YILMAZ

Various Artists

Congo Funk! - Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969-1982)

(Analog Africa)

The influence of James Brown’s visit to Kinshasa for The Rumble in the Jungle is overwhelmingly evident on this 14-track compilation. It particularly shines through on tracks like Orchestre O​.​K. Jazz’s ‘Kiwita Kumunani’, with its sharp beats and vocal protestations weaving among lively horns and percussion. This quasi-frantic energy is juxtaposed with the smooth machinations of the following track, G​.​O. Malebo’s ‘Fianc​é​e Laya’, whose vocal intro sets up a calming and uplifting song. This switch-up of vibes continues throughout the record, creating an impressive soundscape and providing powerful insight into the Congolese funk scene of 1969-1982.ERIN COBBY

British & Irish Folk

Katherine Priddy

The Pendulum Swing

(Cooking Vinyl)

Birmingham-born Priddy’s second full-length album proved a literate and thoughtful showcase for her maturing skills, not only as a songwriter but also as a performer. While her striking debut featured songs written as a teenager, often reflecting her love of literature and poetry, here, after plenty of hard-scrabble gigging, she found herself preoccupied, she says, with “those fundamental, unchanging things at the root of it all: home, family, love.” Delicate and tender but not fragile, increasingly confident but still questioning, classic in style yet adventurous, she sounds more and more like an artist who’s in it for the long run. KEVIN BOURKE

Lankum

Live in Dublin

(Rough Trade Records)

For a drone-led, brawny reinvigoration of Irish traditional songs and tunes, you simply cannot beat Dublin four-piece Lankum. Their well-deserved rise to fame is nothing short of legendary, particularly as a live band, and Live in Dublin stands as both a perfect live album and further testament to their masterful ascension. Playing to a very appreciative home crowd and peppered with knowing mid-song banter, Live in Dublin bursts with an abundant energy and theatrical flair that define the band’s studio sound. A riotous and intoxicating listening experience that keeps listeners on their toes. It’s great, what’s more to say? BILLY ROUGH

Mairearad Green

Hearth

(Mairearad Green)

Has anyone had a better year than Scottish singer, artist and musician Mairearad Green? Everybody Wants to be Like Mary, made in collaboration with Mike Vass via their ADAM project, was groundbreaking, a collection of Gaelic folk melodies in dialogue with bold, inventive electronic beats – Martyn Bennett would have approved. Then there was Anna Bhàn, made with her cousin Rachel Newton, a remarkable harpist, which was a tribute to the Coigach Resistance and their great, great grandmother’s involvement in it. The women of Coigach are also at the heart of Hearth, the first of Green’s albums to be issued this year. ‘The Kelp Makers’, ‘Clachan’ and ‘Pegging Out’ are astonishing works from Green, who plays pipes, accordion, piano and electronic instruments, on these loving tributes to her ancestors. It also comes as a vinyl release with beautiful cover art – Green is a visual artist too, and one we should all get to know much better.
RUSS SLATER JOHNSON

Olivia Chaney

Circus of Desire

(Kartel Music)

Though I am a massive fan of Queen of Hearts, singer-songwriter Olivia Chaney’s superlative trad-folk set with The Decemberists, this year’s Circus of Desire, produced by and featuring The Gloaming’s Thomas Bartlett, is the finest work she’s done. A coming of age and a reckoning, its songs are suffused with a deep psychology, superb lyrics and strong melodies. These are personal songs that open out to the universal, especially on the likes of the stunning opening track ‘Art of Losing’, and in the tenderness of a devotional song to her daughter, ‘Calliope’, it wraps the universal around the personal to create a musical statement of catharsis and inquiry. TIM CUMMING

Macdara Yeates

Traditional Singing from Dublin

(Macdara Yeates)

Self-styled ‘singer of auld songs,’ Yeates steps away from longtime associates Skipper’s Alley for his debut solo album. It’s a heady introduction to his bracing, baleful, baritone voice that sounds as if it’s been dug from the deepest, most fragrant turf. A lone guitar or bodhrán accompanies half of the ten tracks, the others basking in Yeates’ unaccompanied voice. And what a voice. Timeless and as nourishing as a pint of the black stuff, Yeates brings a stout, stirring poetry to a set of standards, mining ‘Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye’ for all its tragicomic poignancy, knowingly channelling Luke Kelly in ‘The Kerry Recruit’ and transforming Dominic Behan’s overlooked ‘Our Last Hope’ into a forlorn, heart-aching classic. MICHAEL QUINN

Global Leftfield

Hi-NRG Bahrain breaks, home-recorded Lebanese ambience and Shamanic sermons from Texan
fourth-worlders

Dar Disku

Dar Disku

(Soundway Records)

Bahrain-raised, London-based DJs and label runners Mazen Almaskati and Vish Mhatre blend samples from across the SWANA region with house, disco, funk and new beat. Despite being active since 2018, Dar Disku is the duo’s first album proper, and while it captures the energy and eclecticism of their DJ sets, it digs deeper into some of those influences, drawing on Algerian rai, khaliji Hi-NRG and habibi house to curate a bold, beat-laden tracklist. To top it off, they’ve roped in a slew of impressive collaborators, including Turkish pop singer Billur Battal and the mighty Asha Puthli. OLIVIA CHEVES

Ak’chamel

Rawskulled

(Akuphone)

On the surface, at least, this mysterious Texan duo operate within the same arcane ethnographic zones as world music magpies Sun City Girls, while largely avoiding their infamous late forebears’ overriding inclination to self-sabotage and alienate. Kicking back on generously reflective passages of pirouetting oud arpeggios, soaring mizmar, plush see-sawing string arrangements and hushed post-rock percussion, Ak’chamel serve up their more abstruse moments as moonlit mood incubators, illuminating Rawskulled’s engagingly esoteric patina. Pulling back the psychedelic veil from the episodic hallucinatory rites and globetrotting skulduggery – eerie ritualistic chants, whispered cabalistic hexes, occasional mutant arabesques and phantasmal static-charged radio chatter – reveals the album’s intoxicating but often invitingly genial, fourth world amalgams, exposing the bountiful Ak’chamel as somewhat tender shamans. SPENCER GRADY

Yara Asmar

Home Recordings 2018-2021 / Synth Waltzes & Accordion Laments

(Hive Mind)

Beirut-based multi-instrumentalist, video artist and puppeteer Yara Amar’s two cassette-only releases from 2022 and 2023 get a much-deserved double-vinyl release courtesy of Brighton’s Hive Mind label. Recorded on cassette and mobile phone, Home Recordings 2018-2021 builds intimate worlds of wafting ambience that are captivating in their elusive strangeness. Drizzly clouds of synth, simple piano melodies and weirdly manipulated field recordings of hymns sung in churches around Lebanon combine to build a dream-like world. On Synth Waltzes & Accordion Laments, Asmar uses an old accordion found in the attic of her grandmother’s home as the primary source for more soporific fantasias. DANIEL SPICER

The editor of Jazzwise shares one of his 2024 highlights

Milton Nascimento & esperanza spalding

Milton + esperanza (Concord Jazz)

From the moment I first heard US bassist/singer esperanza spalding and Rio-born legend Milton Nascimento sing together – during the goosebump-inducing ‘Apple Blossom’ on spalding’s breakthrough 2010 Chamber Music Society album – there was no doubt that theirs was a very special kind of chemistry. Fourteen years later, the magic has been fully realised on this heady album that merges jazz and Brazilian music into an intoxicating whole. Its 16 tracks bridge both generations and musical worlds, via the 82-year-old’s ‘Outubro’ and the utterly gorgeous ‘Morro Velho’, to The Beatles and Michael Jackson, this is life-affirming music pumped straight from the heart. MIKE FLYNN

US & Canada

Label these as Americana or Tex-Mex at your peril

Adeem the Artist

Anniversary

(Four Quarters Records)

If anyone’s poised to take the Americana mantle from Jason Isbell, Adeem the Artist would be my choice. They’re a triple threat, able to write pitch-perfect country songs (‘Part & Parcel’), deeply moving protest folk (‘Night Sweats’ about the horrors in Palestine) and swoon-worthy queer love ballads (‘One Night Stand’). As a non-binary, queer artist beholden to the Nashville country/Americana machinery, Adeem’s got quite the uphill battle, but with songwriting talent this prescient, I don’t know who else you should be looking at for the voice of resistance in a new age. DEVON LÉGER

Alex E. Chávez

Sonorous Present

(Artivist Entertainment)

Chicago-based sonic theorist, scholar and musician Alex E. Chávez, known for his work with bands Dos Santos and Caramelo Haze, creates exquisite musical meditations on moving through life in the liminal spaces of the borderlands. The album is rooted in an aural landscape informed by Mexican son and huapango, in compositions that move seamlessly between poetry, psych-tinged jazz and field recordings. Along the way, Chávez explores experiences of loss and migration and how many of us have to negotiate a beautiful and fraught balance, crisscrossing cultures and navigating dual, often disparate, ways of being. CATALINA MARIA JOHNSON

Jake Blount & Mali Obomsawin

symbiont

(Smithsonian Folkways)

‘Mali and I are issuing warnings on behalf of the Earth and its creatures using the sounds and words of our dead ancestors,’ is how Providence, Rhode Island-based string maestro Jake Blount describes the collaborative impetus behind symbiont, the release he concocted with bassist-vocalist Mali Obomsawin. Drawing upon disparate source material, including shape-note hymns, slave songs, spirituals and First Nations anthems, beat sequences, fuzzy guitars, gourd banjos and drones, symbiont is a bewitchingly beautiful Earth-first parable about climate change that packs the punch of a hurricane in the Appalachian Mountains. DOUG DELOACH

Music Books

Travels through Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Britain and beyond as we take a look at some of the major music books released this year

Joe Boyd

And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music (Faber)

Anyone anticipating a world music equivalent of Joe Boyd’s first book, White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s – a splendid, gossipy insider’s tale of making records with the likes of Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention and Nick Drake – might have been disappointed by And the Roots of Rhythm Remain. Those who hoped for something deeper and more ambitious were richly rewarded with an epic book that is nothing less than a history of the world, told through its music. Of course, Boyd is part of the story – how could he not be given the albums by the likes of Toumani Diabaté, Trio Bulgarka and Kanda Bongo Man he put out on his Hannibal label – and it means he has plenty of personal insights and anecdotes to share. But there is so much more here than a ‘my adventures in world music’ memoir. Over 900 pages, we get an erudite but highly readable survey that stretches sans frontières from Africa to the Caribbean and Latin America and through South Asia to Europe via a complex web of musical trade routes. One chapter, for example, opens with Ravi Shankar, takes in the influence of Indian music on The Beatles and John Coltrane, moves seamlessly from raga to qawwali and Nusrat and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and then on to Romani music and flamenco, taking in Django Reinhardt and Manitas de Plata’s meeting with Bob Dylan at a gypsy festival in France. Every Songlines reader should beg, borrow or preferably buy a copy without further ado. NIGEL WILLIAMSON

Rikki Stein

Moving Music: The Memoirs of Rikki Stein

(Wordville Press)

Rikki Stein has enjoyed a fascinating life. He’s best known as the long-time friend and manager of Fela Kuti, and as the man who has done the most to promote the extraordinary legacy of the Afrobeat creator since his death in 1997. But that’s just one part of his history. Rikki was also crucial to the success of the musicians of Joujouka, that extraordinary village of Moroccan musicians. And then there are the stories about the Grateful Dead, Guinea’s Les Ballet Africaines, the ever-courageous Ugandan singer Bobi Wine, and more. A great read. ROBIN DENSELOW

Ian Brennan

Missing Music: Voices From Where The Dirt Roads End (PM Press)

Brennan has spent the last 15 years travelling the globe and making albums that give a voice to unknown and often amateur musicians from such far-flung outposts as South Sudan, São Tomé, Djibouti, Suriname, Bhutan and beyond. This engaging book collects together the stories behind the field recordings and, as Marilena Umuhoza Dell, whose photos adorn its pages, puts it in the foreword: ‘The power of Missing Music consists in recovering buried pieces of music from underrepresented areas of our earth.’ NIGEL WILLIAMSON

Ben Edge

Folklore Rising

(Watkins)

There’s no shortage of gazetteers surveying the weirdness of British folklore; I have a number of them, but Folklore Rising stands out for its fine artwork – a symbolic narrative pick-n-mix of the seen, the unseen and the intimated, often suffused in Yeatsian twilight – and the personal thread running through it. Edge’s book arose from personal crises, and its survey of the year, from Padstow’s Maytime Obby Oss to the rituals of late winter, and taking in the likes of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance and the Rollright Stones, has him travelling and talking to people taking part in rituals we make today that are in plain sight of those from the past. TIM CUMMING

Gramophone’s editor shares a favourite album of the year

Smetana Má vlast

Czech Philharmonic Orchestra / Semyon Bychkov

Pentatone PTC5187 203

Back in the late 19th century, Bedřich Smetana’s remarkable cycle of tone poems paid homage to the composer’s Bohemian homeland, its landscape and stories – something at the heart of so much music Songlines covers today. From the soulfully strummed harps that open this exquisitely detailed performance, through the richly-woven orchestral textures that sweep the listener along as if they were the waters of the mighty Vltava river itself, this is a beautiful performance from an orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, that hold this music in deep affection. MARTIN CULLINGFORD