 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|
|
|
||
 |
 |
|
 |
Music Compilations Mento Madness (V2) 
 |
 |
|
 |
||||||||
 |
|
 |
|||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||
 |
 |
|
 |
||||||||
| Mento Madness (V2) |
| By Nigel Valentine | |
Monday, 08 March 2004 Description:18 mento tracks from Jamaica’s Motta recording studio 1951-56. Which means? It’s the Jamaican flavour of calypso basically (calypso is from Trindad, mento from Jamaica). Is it much cop? Well, the music is 50 years old, from the birth of the Jamaican recording industry, it’s basic in the extreme and sounds as if it was recorded in a shed or a garage but it has a certain charm you have to appreciate. Some of the 18 tracks are medleys so something you’ve already heard appears again later on. How many good tracks? Difficult to call this one, considering I’m clutching at straws reference wise, but if I had to program this into my CD player I’d pick five of the 18 tracks. Personal favourites are ‘Healin’ in the Balmyard’, ‘Glamour Gal’ and ‘Monkey Talk’, which offers an amusing social commentary on negative human behaviour. And the bad? Well I thought ‘Big Big Sambo Gal/Mattie Rag’, Swine Lane Gal/Iron Bar’ or ‘Manassa with the Tight Foot Pants’ all stank. The latter of these was a sartorial tale that just seemed to grate. Biggest diappointment? That I haven’t heard Sean Paul update and cover any of these already. ‘Glamour Gal’ could be called ‘Glamour bitch’ featuring Blu Cantrell maybe, or ‘Sweet Charlie’ could be called ‘Sweet Charlie’ I guess! Verdict: Next to contemporary Jamaican music it’s positively puritanical in nature as opposed to the audio porn and violence prevalent today. So pure is it’s nature that it evokes a memory to a time that was, perhaps, no less violent or sexual but the culture hadn’t been sexualised to such an extreme degree as it has now. Not exactly going to displace Lemon Jelly or Zero 7 as background music for anyone’s dinner party. In fact the only place listening to this would seem natural is if you were watching a Caribbean sunset on the beach, drunk on rum with a band playing underneath some palm trees. Sorry for the cliché but otherwise this is strictly for fans of calpyso or those with an obsessive passion for Jamaican music and its history. So that’s just John Peel and Mark Lamarr then. (1½/5) Release Date: 08 March 2004
|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
|
© 2004-2006 uk-fusion.com
All rights reserved. Editor: Afsheen Shaikh.
Powered by LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) |
|
 |
|
 |