MICK MCSHANE is roused by a band whose socialism laces every line of every song with commitment and raw passion
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Album reviews with Chris Sealre: May 17, 2022
New releases from Mountain, Soul Asylum and Michael McDermott
ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
Mario Laginha
Jangada
Edition Records
★★★★
The Portuguese pianist Mario Laginha, born in Lisbon in 1960, describes his new album which he calls Jangada (or Raft) as the result of a creative process of “picking up pieces of driftwood and binding them together to form a whole.”
With bassist Bernardo Moreira and drummer Alexandre Frazao, he does just that with his pianism, forging a record of delights from fragments of sound, with a touch that reminds me of the great American pianist Ran Blake, who once made an album called Driftwoods.
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