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

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in fRoots issue 328, 2010
 

GALANDUM GALUNDAINA
Senhor Galandum
Emiliano Toste EMTCD136/09

I ran into the gaitas, skin-headed drums and robust masculine vocals of Galandum Galundaina a decade or more ago playing on the stages and streets of a festival in Madeira, and subsequently in a fRoots piece described them as “the real thing from Terra de Miranda”. They still are. They’re largely responsible for sustaining as a living entity the traditional music of Miranda do Douro, close up to the border with Spain on north-east Portugal’s high rocky Trás-os-Montes plateau.
      Brothers Paulo, Alexandre and Manuel Meirinhos and Paulo Preto are the sort of band one can’t imagine tinkering in a dark studio but that get out there and on with it live.
      They can do it on record too, though. This fourth album is titled after and includes the dance-song from which the band took its name; in Mirandês, which the group all speak, 'galandum' and 'galundaina' are both variations on the word for a gentleman, a gallant.
      It’s a very fine piece of work, with all the spirit of a field recording while cunningly blending in with their raw, resonant baritone vocals quite a variety of instruments, many made by themselves, including Mirandese, sanabrese and Galician gaitas, hurdy-gurdy, dulzaina, harmonica, rabel, pipe-and-tabor and other flutes over the gutty thudding and rattle of gutty skin-headed traditional snare, frame and bass drums. Guests, too, are woven in without any loss of direction, including well-known Portuguese singer-poet Sergio Godinho, a typically strong contribution from Galicia’s Uxía, and the characterful voice of the Meirinhos brothers’ mother Eliodora Ventura, from whom they learned many of their songs. Indeed, even with the strength of their instrumental sound, they never lose the emphasis on vocals, and delight in the insistent, uplifting, memorable song melodies.
      During the penultimate track, a field recording of Eliodora and her sister Maria Helena Ventura duetting unaccompanied, odd and unexpected sounds begin to appear: electronic retouches from remixer Hugo Correia, leader of ‘folklore hardcore’ band Fadomorse. The closer Nabos is a further surprise, a full-blown remix by Correia of a track (whose title means ‘turnips’) from Galandum Galundaina’s first album; not the simplistic application of beats but getting in amongst and moving chunks around in a rather pleasing and stimulating way. A fellow ‘Trasmontano’, Correia is familiar with and sensitive to his traditional music.
      In their booklet note the group say: “Since time immemorial, traditional music is renewed. We wanted with this album and especially with this theme to show that the Mirandese music is not only a souvenir from the past”. These people aren’t avoiding the 21st century, they’re embracing it on their own terms. And, with almost no chordal instruments - no thrumming guitars or bouzouki-citterns (well, actually there are subtle touches of guest bouzouki on a couple of tracks) - pretty much bypassing the fashions of the last decades of C20.
      On first listen I expected they’d return to a straight song as a coda. But better as it is, because this isn’t an album that evaporates as soon as it’s stopped whirling in the CD drive; in the silence after the end one’s left with a lingering audio memory of that last, recurring traditional theme in Nabos.
      www.emilianotoste.pt, www.galandum.pt, www.myspace.com/galandumgalundaina


© 2010 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 -