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Album Reviews
Album Review: Josephine Foster & The Victor Herraro Band – Anda Jaleo (Fire)
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 26 October 2010
On her last album, ‘Bright As A Star’, singer Josephine Foster reinterpreted the poems of Emily Dickinson, that doyen of sexually repressed and intensely lonely verse, as folky laments. On ‘Anda Jaleo’ she does the same to the work of Federico Garcia Lorca.
The album’s eleven sparse, meditative tracks are re-imaginings of a series of songs written by one of Spain’s eminent and most enduring writers – songs that were banned under Franco’s reign. Having no Spanish myself, and only being already familiar with Garcia Lorca’s play ‘The House Of Bernard Alba’, the intricacies of the album’s lyrics are lost on me. As a result the record, for the uninitiated, becomes an exercise in guitar and vocal interplay and is, for the large part, somewhat dull.
Castanets crackle in the background every so often and the odd harp is plucked, but the emphasis is on Foster’s delicate voice (and it is, to be fair to the album, a beautiful, haunting, crackly 78rpm voice) and how it intermingles with classic flamenco guitar. This combination faithfully evokes visions of Spanish plazas at dusk, all flouncy skirts, olive skin and cold sangria. But sometimes it’s nicer to have those memories as memories, rooted firmly in time and place, than as an uneventful folk record.
Foster’s intentions should be applauded but not necessarily enjoyed. JAB
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