Tara Minton creates a world outside of what we’re used to,
laces it with Mexican flavours and invites us in. She was, clearly overwhelmed
by her first visit to Mexico City in April 2023 that it drove her to return 3
months later, borrow a harp, immerse herself in the City’s culture and write
this album in a two week blaze of energy. Lyrically strong, albeit subdued in
performance, the album works through allusion and sinuous rhythms to create
moods and emotions and it’s these dark atmospheric moments that give this music
its subtle power
We open with the opening title track delivered as a whispered, seductive poem over a slithering, insidious, pulsing bass line. The lyric is full of temptation and the most romantic, intoxicating, fantastical dreams of escape through a Faustian bargain with a particularly Machiavellian devil. Gorodi adds piercing trumpet to substantially raise the temperature. If you wondered what sultry sounded like, here it is! El Colibri, by way of contrast is much more of a song of daylight; a multi-layered flowing piece of sunshine with Minton’s harp doing most of the dancing whilst wordless vocals swoop and soar; an increasingly forceful invitation to hip mobility. Iztapalapa is snatches of a quiet, intense fury intermingled with more elegant, desperate passages that seem to be feeling for something out of reach. A desperate romantic yearning infuses Minton’s voice on Cariño before a beautiful trumpet solo, little more than a breeze, adds to the romance.
Shadow
Dance teases in its opening bars and then Minton adds a series of
fragile runs on the harp, circling and lifting, falling and releasing, its
sparseness somewhere between a two mallet vibes player and a plucked guitar.
The harp comes into its own on Let It
Rain sounding like falling drops, it’s lifted by the bluesiest mariachi
trumpet you’re ever likely to hear. A brief, free, breakdown brings the thunder
before a more optimistic line on the harp creeps out and the trumpet rises in
hope over wailing voices, now defiant but still searching for love.
En
Otra Vida blends the three woman chorus of Colman, Minton and
Wheeler, using the delicacy of the harp as a launch pad as the voices wind
round each other, falling back to allow the harp, gentle and pastoral, to push
to the fore before it is subsumed by more forceful vocals. A More Colourful Life is a highlight as Minton and bassist John
Williamson duet beautifully, playing the spaces in each other’s lines. Minton’s
lyrics tell of how she has come to Mexico for “a more colourful life” but that
the devil sneaks in. Último Baile Con El
Diablo, briefly, returns to the
melody and lyrical themes of the opener; the Devil is back! His return seems to
infuse the dance driven closer, My Heart
Is A Song. It’s the most forceful and dramatic piece on the album, defiant
and full blooded where the strength of much of the rest of the album lies in
its quiet intensity, all shackles are cast off here. The percussion is bolder,
the trumpet is louder and the voices more strident with Minton wailing the “my
heart is a song” against a male chorus singing the title in Spanish.
Unlike those reality programmes where a talentless gonk
learns to squeeze all feeling out of a 60s soul classic, this actually feels
like a journey. One where the listener is lured and tempted along the path
where Tara Minton leads.
Dave
Sayer
When The
Devil Invites You To Dance is out on 11th September from
the usual outlets and, if you’d like a flavour of the album I would recommend that
you check out a performance of the title track HERE
on YouTube.
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