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Written in fRoots issue 275, 2006


LEILÍA
Son De Leilía
Leilear, no number (2005)

MILLADOIRO
Milladoiro 25
Discmedi-Blau DM 4050-02 (2005)

The Galician music boom was for long a largely instrumental thing, spearheaded by bagpipes, but that was clearly ignoring one of the Galician tradition’s great strengths, its songs and the robust way of singing them, often in groups. The pandeiretera group Leilía formed fifteen years ago and has gone a long way to rectifying that. Son De Leilía is a bracing, lively retrospective, a compilation of tracks from their own albums and other recording projects, demos, film music and collaboration in the works of others including Xosé Manuel Budiño, Alecrín and Milladoiro.
      Joining their pandeiretas on some tracks are many of the traditional and non-traditional instrumental sounds of the Galician revival, which the group absorbs and balances against, their vocal character and the melodies so strong that they never become dominated. It’s joyful, jubilant, the real stuff, strong female voices in call and response, gutsy unison and occasional harmony, full of memorable songs sung without any cutesiness or pretension in the vibrant edgy traditional style, and it flows well as a complete album rather than a patchwork.

      Ten years before Leilía started drawing attention to the pandeiretera vocal tradition, Milladoiro began to pioneer the upsurge in Galician instrumental music. Their anniversary album revisits many of their best-known tunes but, unlike on Leilía’s, they’re re-recorded by the band as it is now, which tends to treat them as if we already know them, often using them in medleys where the original recordings made a stronger and clearer statement of their splendid and very distinctively Galician melodies.
      Milladoiro 25 is a good enough lush listen, a step onward rather than a simple ‘best of’, and comes in an elegant silver-white embossed Digipak with a fat booklet that consists largely of scans of their press cuttings, but as I said when briefly previewing it in the feature about the band in fR 270, I’d recommend a listen to their back-catalogue. The earlier the better, when they were playing their strongest tunes fresh, shapely and acute, before they discovered the comfort of leaning on keyboard bass and string-synth pads. A retrospective of the Leilía type, of the original recordings gathered from their several labels, would be most welcome.
      Discmedi is at www.discmedi.com. Leilía’s album, which seems scandalously little-distributed, and their three earlier releases, can be bought direct from www.leilia.net.


© 2006 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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