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Music Album reviews with Michal Boncza: March 9, 2022

New release from Trupa Trupa, Gabriel Moreno and Gilmore Trail

 

Trupa Trupa
B FLAT A
Glitterbeat
★★★★★

THE quartet from Gdansk has received much acclaim for their remarkable innovation and intelligent exploration of rock’s hinterland. TT’s mastery of instruments and groundbreaking arrangements continue to conjure spellbinding scapes.

Their minimalist, acerbic lyrics explore “the wasteland of human nature where hatred and genocide are not just distant reverberations of Central European history but still resonate in contemporary reality,” states guitarist and lead singer Grzegorz Kwiatkowski.

Covid has also left a mark with Poland particularly affected by governmental inaction, widespread vaccine rejection and subsequent horrific death statistics. Kwiatkowski believes the album is “kind of a study of disintegration and decomposition.”  

Trupa Trupa’s album is, unusually, unconcerned with the personal, instead it chooses to look outward and in that sense it is deeply and eloquently political. The somnambulic monotony of Uniforms “I wanna be all my uniforms” a case in point.

A band ahead of time, for our time.

 

 

Gabriel Moreno
The Year Of The Rat
(Poetry Mondays Records)
★★★★

“AN offshoot of Leonard Cohen,” said BBC6 Music presenter — a comparison worth making.

Gibraltarian Gabriel Moreno is a singer-songwriter poet (he has 10 books to his name) whose lyrics are political in the mould of the anarchist Georges Brassens or the “fidelista” Jean Ferrat.

The The Year Of The Rat (2020 in Chinese zodiac) explores the struggles of that year not just of musicians but other working folk.

The stylish Quivering Poets expertly sustain Moreno’s warm baritone which infuses these ballads with empathy and solidarity.

The melancholy of Dreams Of The Poor: “Where do they go?/The dreams of the poor/Where do they hide?” or the upbeat Lorca and Baudelaire inspired Sellotape My Heart: “Now it seems we are all sealed and bound to the lies of the money louts” are a sanguine spark of light and a musical balm.

 

 

Gilmore Trail
Impermanence
(Chasmata Records)
★★★★

Gilmore Trail are named after Alaska’s lauded route for experiencing the Northern Lights. Impermanence, however, comes in the wake of a world turned upside down where all routes to wonderment and bliss were no longer clear cut.

At a time like this the Sheffield instrumental-rock quartet responded with an immersive musical meditation in a vocabulary that offers permanence by its familiarity.

Oscillating between the dreamy, soothing scapes of the beautiful Nocturne and the guitar barrages of Echoes Of Solitude or Zone Of Silence to the elegantly balanced, evocative Ruins — each interspaced with dainty, refined interludes.

David Ivall and Danny Mills work on guitars, one moment intricately delicate, the next potent and forceful, is anchored immaculately by Joe Richards’s bass and Bob Brown’s drums.

Like the northern lights Impermanence will dazzle with its shifts between passages of tranquillity and spirited, tempestuous soundbursts. Highly recommended.

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