- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in fRoots issue 239, 2003


FALTRIQUEIRA
Faltriqueira
Resistencia RESCD 140 (2002)

At last emerging from the hotbed of Galicia’s roots instrumental music upsurge is the rightful status of singing. At first it was the presence of a singer, usually female, as either a member or guest of an otherwise largely instrumental band, but now it’s female vocal groups, continuing and expanding on the tradition of pandeireteras – groups of women singers accompanying themselves on pandeiretas, tambourines.
      Faltriqueira – Maria López, Ana Leira, Carolina Rodríguez, Teresa García and Olalla López – have been together for five years or so, singing on their own or as guests with bands, particularly with the powerful Luar Na Lubre. Their material is from the popular tradition, and they perform it with the traditional exuberant, hard-edged young-girl vocal sound, which is usually in unison but in their case is developed to some extent with harmony and part-singing.
      Parallel roots booms in other parts of northern Iberia have resulted in enhanced movement of musicians and exchange of ideas along the north coast. So it is that Faltriqueira’s first album was made in a studio in Euskadi and features a number of Basque musicians. The producer, musical director and instrumental arranger is Euskadi-resident French multi-instrumentalist and composer Pascal Gaigne, who as well as his own albums and film scores has for years been creating masterly arrangements for Basque singer Amaia Zubiria, most recently on her 2002 album Haatik.
      For Faltriqueira he has drawn on a wide palette: a sweeping Arabic flavour of flutes, darabukkas, pandeiro and Gaigne’s guitar and oud for Palmira’s sinuous tune, sonorous cello, cor anglais and accordeon against intricate guitar in A Herba De Namorar, or for Agarrado De Brañas Verdes just Javi Area’s percussion interplaying with Oreka TX’s pattering txalaparta. Nana/Beijai gets a liquid, dreamy treatment of echoed guitar around its first section’s solo vocal, which moves to vocal layering with a seductive sliding semitone rise and fall motif. The txalaparta duo reappear with the skittering trikitixa of Kepa Junkera, in whose band they play, in a very natural meeting of Galician and Euskal for Labrada De Cortellas. It’s not until track 10, Muñeira Vella De Mórdomo, that the Galician gaita, in the hands of Daniel López, makes its entry; a couple of tracks later it goes on to initiate a pandeirada of the traditional form, just ricketing pandeiretas and unison voices. The closing track, Sae Lúa, is a gorgeous thing of overlapping voices and Arabic-inflected western-orchestral string arrangement, pulsed by pizzicatos, dumbek and fluttering darabukkas.
      There’s none of the levelling, obscuring instrumental mush that has sometimes afflicted major northern Iberian roots-enhancement projects. Every track is an alertly intelligent arrangement in which the vocals and catchy melodies are in charge, and the pandeiretas are not produced away but have their natural role. What remains in the memory has the true melodious essence and spirit of the Galician song tradition, whose ongoing life this album and the work of today’s new pandeireteras does much to assure. (It’s no mere accident of design that Mercedes Peón’s album Isué, a clarion call in what’s developing, bears the sun-like symbol of a curly-edged pandeireta jingle.)


© 2003 Andrew Cronshaw
 

You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -