Les Triaboliques Travels The Globe

Les Triaboliques is a group whose entire existance is a study in patience and perserverance. This collaboration between Ben Mandelson, Lu Edmonds, and Justin Adams is the culmination of a decades-long exhaustive quest to absorb and utilize the planet's panoply of sound. Having done this individually for ages, it only made sense that these artists would allow their paths to cross, would record together, and that their album, rivermudtwilight would see the light of day.

rivermudtwilight is an album that while mostly composed by this British trio sounds as if it were on a worldwide excursion to exotic locales. Using both traditional and non-traditional/exotic instrumentation as well as vocals in various languages, Les Triaboliques has put together an album that feels about as British as Outer Mongolia. Intimate and quiet, rivermudtwilight represents a global trek of predominantly acoustic music that only occasionally hints at it's origin. With middle eastern, Balkan, and eastern European influences running through out so much of what Les Triaboliques play their sound is truly unique because of how it all blends together so seamlessly. See their awesome version of the Animals classic, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," for a fine example of this. Here's a song that even your grandmother knows but thanks to these guys unique talent and years of experience they create something that sounds practically foreign and new; it's brilliant stuff.

Much of the material that Les Triaboliques writes is like that, a musical convergence of things that are known and unusual into something that sounds fresh and mysterious. rivermudtwilight is a enthralling and curious record that never ceases to entertain. This is an album of experience and world wariness. In Justin Adams words, "I think it's a record that couldn't have been made by younger people. In the playing and singing you can feel the years of dusty bus rides, chaotic soundchecks, ecstatic concerts, mastery, and confusion in roughly equal measures, a warts and all portrait of gnarly mavericks." Truer words could not have been spoken. It may have taken an eternity to get Justin Adams and his cohorts together but it's been worth the wait. Let's just hope it doesn't take another eternity before they decide to cross paths again and record another album as Les Triaboliques.