Yol

It's been 25 years since Kardeş Türküler first banded together at Istanbul's Bosphorus University. This ninth album, Yol (The Road), has come out after a break of five years and is a collection of retooled songs from the Turkish, Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, Circassian and Balkan realms. The name Kardeş Türküler means ‘Songs of Brotherhood’ and has a subtle left-wing connotation. The group stand for universal brotherhood of peoples and are against discrimination in any form; they have always been at least implicitly political, highlighting songs from suppressed minorities and singing in native tongues, which had up until very recently been banned from the media in Turkey.

The most minimalist are the most successful of the renditions, which sometimes suffer from a massing of instruments, overwhelming the ear. Sometimes the songs are overloaded with too many sounds, choral voices, vocal cries and flourishes from traditional instruments, so that a lot of the power is lost in a veritable wall of sound. ‘Kayseri Ğogum/Kayseri Yolunda’, however, is a very simple song, a haunting lament with relatively spare instrumentalisation; it abides by the purity of the original, a women's song on the occasion of a village's men-folk going off to war. Bass, saz (lute) and mellow accordion are added, along with the sound of a train whistle and the clip of train tracks. Kardeş Tüküler prove that one can cover traditional songs in a way that is not frozen in the past. Ultimately, the message of Yol is one of hope in a time of political polarisation in Turkey.