Les Triaboliques - Rivermudtwilight

Described by the band as "distressed string band music for the 21st century", this is an album of mostly low-key but classy global mood music, performed by a new trio with a ridiculously complex musical history. On acoustic and occasional electric guitar there's Justin Adams, best-known for his work with Robert Plant and his stomping African fusion duets with Juldeh Camara. On saz and cumbus (the Middle Eastern long-necked lute and banjo) there's Lu Edmonds, who has played with everyone from Billy Bragg to the Mekons and is about to rejoin Public Image Ltd, while on mandolin, banjo and other stringed instruments, there's Ben Mandelson, whose extensive CV includes work with Bragg and African bands. They have all played an important role in the development of global music, and here they mix their influences on a set that swerves between European, Middle Eastern, Latin and American styles. Their vocals are low-key, but the instrumental work is exquisite, from the frantic ragtime-east European clash of Ledmo to the stomping title track Phosphor Lane, or an unlikely, brooding treatment of Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.
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Les Triaboliques are full of surprises, but the biggest of all is that it took this long to happen. rivermudtwilight, the breathtaking collaboration from multi-instrumentalists Ben Mandelson, Lu Edmonds and Justin Adams is the culmination of a decades-long, indefatigable quest by these voracious visionaries to absorb and utilize the planet's panoply of sound. Having exercised their skills individually within numerous diverse settings, it was perhaps inevitable that this "meeting of the ancient guild of post-punk, Anglo, globetrotting string players reveling in idiosyncrasy," as Adams describes it, would eventually come to fruition. The album comprises eleven exquisitely rendered tracks - most composed by the British trio - that employ a battery of conventional and exotic instruments, multilingual vocals and a seamless merger of international influences. These diablos of dusk-core offer new distressed string band music for the 21st Century. The Desert, the Delta, the Steppes and the Underground - all are united in what Mandelson likes to call "Triabolique Twi-Fi."