Album Review

Speed Caravan – Kalashnik Love

• 2nd Oct 2009

As world music goes, Speed Caravan are about as world-music-y as you can get:
Odd name; check.
Strange instruments; check.
French members; check.
Covers of normal songs made to sound a bit nuts; double check.

All the ingredients are there, every angle has been covered and all suggestions that this album could be genre specific are swept under Speed Caravan’s Arabian rug, a rug probably bought from a flea market with both their instruments and their hard-to-follow, bitty and difficult direction.

But the album does escape some world music myths and it is not simply jangling nonsense, in fact at times the intelligence and experience of these musicians/artists is an extreme form of sound-pleasure, bordering on GRADE 9 of sound pleasure actually ( a grade known as super-nice to the average person who does not deal in the sound-pleasure-ometer).

To conclude, Speed Caravans album is worth a listen for three reasons. One, it introduces you to the sound-pleasure scale. Two, it is a reminder that world music is an inventive and worthwhile art and three, it allows you to fathom up the image of metaphorical suggestions being swept under rustic and Aladdin like rugs.