WARSAW VILLAGE BAND
Infinity
Barbés Records 0021
The Iron Curtain didn’t was swept away by a global tidal wave and the Warsaw Village Band is the musical embodiment of the flotsam left in its wake. This is decidedly not your grandmother’s Polish dance band. There are no accordions present and you won’t find a polka until track nine. Good luck in recognizing it as such! What you will find are snippets of traditional Polish music as filtered through industrial rock, African village singing, Delta blues, Bollywood, reggae, primal keening, Goth sensibilities, and your local disco. Mix those elements with soupcons of Sweden’s Garmarna and Finland’s mighty Värttinä and you’ll still have to hear this band to get a sense of how glorious they truly are. Can you imagine what Willie Dixon would have played on cello? Check out “Little Baby Blues.” How about a raga in which fiddles and dulcimers sound like a sitar on LSD? Listen to “Circle No. 1.” There’s no guitar anywhere on this record, yet it sounds wilder than anything Jimi Hendrix ever envisioned. Spin “Wise Kid Song” and the cello, fiddle, and frame drums will explode in your head like a Fillmore West light show. And the abandonment with which Maja Kleszcz, Magdalena Sobczak, Sylwia Swiatkowska, and Wojtek Krzak attack the vocals is almost frightening. It’s been a long time since a new release so utterly blew me away. This is truly one of the best global fusion records of the 21st century.--LV
Check out this YouTube video.
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