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1 week ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
XOLO Jullian Records The latest album from Tucson, Arizona-based rock group XIXA (each “x” sounds like a “ch”) is an intentionally dramatic outing. Over nine tracks, XOLO tells the tale of Arcoiris, a young girl guided by Xolo, a hairless Xoloitzcuintli dog, through the nine levels of Mictlān, the nine-level underworld of Aztec cosmology.
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1 week ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
Salsa de la Bahia Vol. 3: Renegade Queens Patois Records In his liner notes to Salsa de la Bahia Vol. 3: Renegade Queens, renowned San Francisco Bay Area jazz DJ and music writer Jesse “Chuy” Varela offers crucial context. “As you listen to the music presented here,” he writes, “understand that this compilation is as much a celebration of the Bay Area music community as it is these individual artists.” Of course, the community in question is no one thing.
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2 weeks ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
So Kono NØ FØRMAT! It’s not all that surprising that Salif Keita’s 2018 farewell album Un Autre Blanc was not the end of his recording career. After all, as Keita himself has explained over the years, music is his life, a path for which he gave up his standing in Mandinka royalty, a mode of expression through which he has found global renown.
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2 weeks ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
Kiniata Helico Music Congolese band Kin’gongolo Kiniata’s name is a Lingala-language reference to the sounds of metal oil barrels being moved down the streets during the power cuts that marked 2000s Kinshasa. The group translates it as “the crushing sound”. In some ways, it’s apt; their dense grooves and bold sounds make for a hefty blend. All the same, the five members of Kin’gongolo Kiniata approach their music with care, translating into a finesse that is still fresh and layered.
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3 weeks ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
Dracones Editions Mego Hüma Utku’s Dracones begins by locating its listeners in deep space, or perhaps deep waters: we are floating, drifting, surrounded by otherworldly drones and echoes. We hear cosmic resonances–alien life or whalesong?–that morph from hums to howls to cries and back over layers of vibrational haze. Voices are distorted, cello strings groan, and an electromagnetic lyre (Mihalis Shammas’s lyraei) shrieks.
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4 weeks ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
Breath AIR Music There are no creative half measures for Farnaz Ohadi. She comes by it honestly. Born in Iran to parents with strong musical inclinations, she recalls her father playing reel-to-reel tapes front to back, over and over, of music from around the world. At the forefront of his interests was flamenco. A “life-affirming” trip to southern Spain made the historical connections between West Asia and Western Europe tangible for a then-teenage Ohadi, changing the trajectory of her life.
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1 month ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
Sol Olindo Multi-instrumentalist Raúl Monsalve and band Los Forajidos are in ecstasy on the new album Sol. The group’s third full-length release features some of their highest energy to date. They make music in a vivid spectrum, jazz melding with funk and sprinkled with synthpop, all shaped by Monsalve’s home music scene of Caracas and his collaborators’ backgrounds.
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1 month ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
Yarın Yoksa Big Crown Singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Derya Yıldırım is no easy artist to pin down, and neither is Yarın Yoksa, the new release from her and Grup Şimşek, the ensemble she leads made up of keyboardist Graham Mushnik, guitarist and bassist Antonin Voyant, and drummer Helen Wells. With a title meaning “if there is no tomorrow”, it’s devoted to yesterdays and nows.
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1 month ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
At the end of the title track of her debut album A.O.E.I.U., an ecstatic Florence Adooni rhapsodizes about music. It is many things, she says: the art of time, a metaphor for life, capable of generating cosmic meaning. It is “an ordinary exercise in unity”, the phrase for which the title stands. In Adooni’s case, though, ordinary is not a euphemism for dull. Instead, perhaps it’s shorthand for the idea of music as intertwined with everyday being, for groundedness and inclusivity.
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1 month ago | 
popmatters.com | Adriane Pontecorvo
Tears of Injustice Matador With each successive album, since he realized his rock god potential on 2019’s Ilana (The Creator), Nigerien singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar has been bringing more heat. Last year’s Funeral for Justice was an electric firestorm of guitar skill and trenchant political critique. Where could he possibly go from there? The opposite direction. Well, kind of.
