The Scorpios

The Scorpios are a ten-piece band with most members originating from Khartoum in Sudan, and are now based in London having fled the fundamentalist regime. This, their debut album, is released as a vinyl LP, digital download code and CD – all in one package. Two tracks from the album have previously been released in a 7” single format on the fledgling Afro7 record label.

It's a potent set of modern desert blues, based on Sudanese traditional music. Female vocalist, Regia Ishag, fronts the group with her raw and wailing Middle Eastern-flavoured vocal. The band play funky loping rhythms, with less of the easy-blues guitar styling of the popular Touareg groups of the Sahara region. This makes for a far more edgy musical experience – closer in sound to what readers may be familiar with from Mauritania or Ethiopia. The Scorpios’ guitars meander, the horns interject and a synthesizer lazily swirls. It's sometimes musically crude, the vocals occasionally slightly cacophonous, but always sufficiently off-kilter to be curiously seductive.