- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw Facebook -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in fRoots issue 383, May 2015

RÚSTICA
Rústica
Fol Música 100FOL 1083 (2015)

Not every release on Fol Música comes in a big book pack like its Kepa and Raúl Rodríguez albums, but they’re always notable. This one’s in a normal digipak, but it’s special.
     The label leads in exemplifying how Galician professional folk music has emerged from the strong influence of Irish and Scottish music that gave it new youth and confidence in the late 20th century, and reconnected with, and enhanced, the tradition’s identity.
     Rústica brings together four leading Galician musicians: Davide Salvado’s passionate singing crying to the heavens, Cristina Pato’s gaitas wailing and keening against Anxo Pintos’ dronal hurdy-gurdy, and Roberto Comesaña’s accordion thickening and driving the grainy textures.
     Unusual to a degree in featuring a male rather than a female singer, it’s a timelessly mature work, of big, strong, mostly slow songs, rich in the raw essence of Galician traditional music, dark, tense and wild.
     Just gaitas, hurdy-gurdy, accordion and pandeireta around Salvado’s voice (joined occasionally by Pato’s, including her surprisingly deep harmony on their reflective closing duet, Cardadores), its commanding starkness is beautifully arranged and produced, shaped with subtleties.
     Not a long album – just thirty-one and a half minutes – but everything in it counts, and by not over-stretching it the impression left is all the stronger.

www.folmusica.com


© 2015 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.
     For readers/listeners across the Atlantic, 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 -