Sweet Spot Between Extremes Listening Post 391. Värttinä has iconic status in Finnish folk music, and considering the ensemble’s boreal origin it’s no surprise that Kyly, their fourteenth studio album, features themes of heat and cold— expressed in sharp harmonies and...
Trouble in Paradise Listening Post 390. Alison Krauss and her band Union Station are the gold standard for bluegrass and also a study in contrasts—so it hardly strains logic that the group's latest album begins with a dead end. Floating on Krauss’s immaculate and...
Heads or Tails Listening Post 389. Uusikuu’s sixth album has a pastoral title, but the group’s picnic basket has a false bottom, out of which emerges a cornucopia of song and delight. Led by Finnish singer-composers Laura Ryhänen and Mikko Kuisma, the ensemble also...
Streaming Memory Forward Listening Post 388. Cuimhne means “memory” in both Scottish Gaelic and Irish, and as the title track of Allt, Vol. II, it evokes calm mornings, warm afternoons and tranquil evenings (see videos). And like the human forces that shape our world,...
Unbreaking Tradition Listening Post 387. Old fashioned... We all recognize it as a term that can go either way—tired and retrograde or classic and true. Lucibela means it in the positive sense and, with her third album, her tender and commanding voice in Cape Verdean...
Round Trip Listening Post 386. Sauljaljui is a singer-songwriter-musician and a cultural icon of the Paiwan people, one of the indigenous Austronesian tribes living in Taiwan for 6,000 years before Chinese settlement began in the 17th century. She fashions songs from...
Windows and Mirrors Listening Post 385. Tamar Ilana’s fourth album is both an extraordinary weaving of musical strands and an improbable blender of historical forces born in coercion. The album’s deepest musical root is Flamenco—the art form nurtured by Spain’s...
Love & Legacy Listening Post 384. Dadju and Tayc are both on the shortlist of today's leading French singer-songwriters, so when they envisioned a joint album they had every reason to be optimistic about success. Still, they left little to chance: Months in...
Fabric of Life Listening Post 383. In the same way that many people chant and pray in ancient languages they don’t fully understand, so are connoisseurs of world music often inspired by secular songs in languages they have never studied. With Dobet Gnahoré’s seventh...
To Sing, to Fly Listening Post 382. On their tenth album, the gifted artists of Vedan Kolod channel humanity’s fascination with the singing, flight, beauty and vigor of the winged creatures that share our world. The family band—Valerii Naryshkin, Tatiana Naryshkina...
Lyrics, Music and Time Listening Post 381. When it comes to stories of time travel, the future is a blank slate, beckoning any conjecture; the past comes with a written record and hordes of opinionated sentinels. Undeterred, Bernardo Diniz has plunged, rigorously and...
To Catch a Wave Listening Post 380. The ripples, shadows and peaks make the desert landscape look like waves on a red ocean—and that’s just the tip of the metaphor at the heart of Aziza Brahim’s latest album. Mawja—“wave” in Hassaniya Arabic—is a recurring theme of...
Voyage of Discovery Listening Post 379. In 2005, Lina gave a preview of her own career as a fado singer by playing Amália Rodrigues in a theater musical based the great fado diva’s life. On her 2020 album, Lina_Raül Refree, she reinterpreted Amália’s songs, exchanging...
Raising Her Voice Listening Post 378. Often faulted for kitsch, the Eurovision Song Contest achieved gravitas in 2016 when organizers stood up to Russian protests over Ukraine’s winning entry, 1944, about Stalin’s deportation of 200,000 Crimean Tatars to central Asia...
The Global 500 Greatest Songs of All Time Why this list? When I launched World Listening Post in 2015, my goal was the same as that of myriad music publications and websites, with one exception: I would review new albums, but I would concentrate on music that...
The Global 500 Greatest Songs of All Time Why this list? When I launched World Listening Post in 2015, my goal was the same as that of myriad music publications and websites, with one exception: I would review new albums, but I would concentrate on music that...
The Global 500 Greatest Songs of All Time Why this list? When I launched World Listening Post in 2015, my goal was the same as that of myriad music publications and websites, with one exception: I would review new albums, but I would concentrate on music that...
The Global 500 Greatest Songs of All Time Why this list? When I launched World Listening Post in 2015, my goal was the same as that of myriad music publications and websites, with one exception: I would review new albums, but I would concentrate on music that...
The Global 500 Greatest Songs of All Time Why this list? When I launched World Listening Post in 2015, my goal was the same as that of myriad music publications and websites, with one exception: I would review new albums, but I would concentrate on music that...
Sounds Natural and Human Listening Post 377. The Shona name for Victoria Falls, the great cataracts of the Zambezi, is “Mosi-oa-Tunya”—Smoke that Thunders—and the water’s misty roar can be heard as far as 40 km (25 mi) away. But there’s a sound from the adjacent city...
An Irish Feast Listening Post 376. Daoirí Farrell’s fourth solo album is a banquet of songs highlighting humanity, history and folklore, served up by the artist’s peerless voice and the small but elite army of talented musicians around him. As Farrell has perfected...
The Fado Path Listening Post 375. In the fado universe Carminho is a bright star, so it’s natural that people pay attention not only when she sings but also when she speaks about her country’s iconic music genre. “For me,” she said in a recent magazine interview,...
Recipe for Survival Listening Post 374. The keyword from Andrea Menard’s fifth album is “rubaboo,” a stew typically made of meat, vegetables, flour, pemmican and sometimes maple syrup. The mixture is also an apt emblem for the artist and her people: Menard is a...
Dig Deep, Fly High Listening Post 373. Every nation’s history has joyful and mournful chapters, and the Welsh folk/chamber music trio VRï—Patrick Rimes, Jordan Price Williams and Aneirin Jones—uses artistic flair and research rigor to spin their homeland’s ups and...
Shining Star Listening Post 372. Many of West Africa’s leading musicians are from griot families, the celebrated hereditary caste of poet-musician-storytellers that has been a fixture of the region’s culture for centuries. But behind the griot mystique are the...
Unbursting the Bubble Listening Post 371. Art that evokes the Holocaust works best not when it shocks but when it enlightens. The melancholy music of Silent Tears may sound familiar—and its setting might be recognizable if the stage hadn’t gone dark in 1939. In the...
Exile Amplifies Insight Listening Post 370. Art takes us deeper into headlines and history: We wouldn’t have the same understanding of the Spanish Civil War without Guernica; Les Misérables is a lens on the trials of nineteenth-century Parisians. Like Picasso and...
Down Home & Epic Listening Post 369. Strikingly fresh and warmly familiar, George Telek’s music offers a study in contrasts. One of the few singer-songwriters from Papua New Guinea to achieve international renown, he cloaks his touching voice in a stylistic range...
Evergreen Listening Post 368. Darwin believed love songs began as a primeval mating ritual and Byron heard melody in the roar of the deep sea. Romance and nature are the oldest tropes in music and also the newest; every song on these themes we hear today connects us...
A Most Lyrical Syllabus Listening Post 367. Maya Angelou observed that some people can’t recognize opportunity right before their eyes, “while others can sense a good thing coming when it is days, months or miles away.” No wonder that, in the liner notes of her second...
