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CD Review
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Penguin Eggs, CD Review >>
When young Canadian and American musicians pounded some life back into the flatlined heart of country music at the end of the millennium, the taxonomists of genre saddled them with the largely meaningless and rather limiting label ‘alt. country’. Similarly, the Warsaw Village Band’s compelling approach to Polish traditional music is almost invariably tagged in the press and festival programs as ‘hardcore folk’. Apparently it’s a term of self-identification, attributed to the band. Like ‘alt. country’, ‘hardcore folk’ is infectious but somewhat unfortunate shorthand.
Invoking the spirit and aggression of punk rock, the term unduly emphasizes a break from tradition, rather than revitalization and reinvigoration through a connection with tradition, which is the essence of WVB’s artistic success. Lest there be any misunderstanding about their acknowledged debt to living tradition, WVB punctuate their tracks on Uprooting using brief pieces from musical mentors such as Janina and Kazimierz Zdrzalik – a couple of generations removed, but every bit as hardcore in rawness and sparse delivery.
So what do WVB bring to traditional Polish folk repertoire? In a collection of powerful songs rooted in the superstitions and ceremonies, servitude and resistance of rural life, their overriding contribution is a mood that I can only describe as urgency. On their previous release People’s Spring, that urgency was primarily delivered by the vocals and the bass baraban drum. On Uprooting, it’s all about the strings. Staccato fiddle and cello, at home in a Hitchcockian thriller, driving the songs forward.
If pushed to find a point of comparison, I’d use a very un-folk example and suggest the effect is a little like hearing avant gardists Kronos Quartet attacking Hendrix’s Purple Haze – restoring a sense of danger to a track made over-familiar through years of classic rock heavy rotation. And isn’t that the common denominator in all truly successful revivals, whether ‘alt. country’, Kronos on Hendrix, or indeed WVB’s ‘hardcore folk’, a healthy dose of the living dead?
– Gallagher Parkinson
04/22/05
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