I pity the compilers of these Rough Guides sometimes. "Let's see, we need a guide to the music of Spain, you have to fill 65 minutes, get back to us Friday." Given the literally hundreds of music traditions and styles available in a country like Spain, how anyone could possibly create an even "super-rough" overview of what is available is beyond me.
So, we have this disc, zigzagging over 16 tracks (and 16 styles) to act as an overview of Spanish music. So we go from the brass infused electric Catalonia music of Companyía Elèctrica Dharma, to the Rondallas (string band) traditionalism of Ronda Segoviana, to the Basque singer/writer Hiru Truku . Musically, the disc is all over the map, often with jarring changes in tempo and styles on neighbouring tracks -- not that this is a bad disc at all. The songs on this disc are fairly uniformly wonderful (although I could do without Jorge Pardo's flamenco/jazz fusion). Anubía, a six woman acappella group, are particularly interesting, with their "Cantarea" reviving the Galician vocal tradition. José Antonio Ramos brings us some cross-cultural music from the Canary Islands on his sweet "De Isla A Isla," with a rhythm style from the other side of the Atlantic. Indeed, this is a nice collection of songs.
But it's far too varied, distracting the listener from the greatness of the tunes. There is really no sense of consistency or "wholeness" to the disc, as it warps from style to style so radically. Inevitably, this is the problem with any compilation that spans such a broad gamut of styles on one disc. (Imagine an hour long disc called a guide to American music!) Perhaps the fine folks at Rough Guides should consider giving up on the idea of creating compilations for such broad areas, and concentrate on regionalisms: indeed, there are already existing Rough Guides for Flamenco and a couple of Spanish singers. A Galician, Basque, etc. Rough Guide would be a better idea (or, given the sheer volume of World Music Networks' releases, maybe a dozen separate compilations!).
Even given my notoriously short attention span, The Rough Guide To Spain didn't captivate me as well as it should. There's plenty of brilliant music on this disc, but its execution as an album leaves much to be desired. Let's hope these folks don't make this mistake again.
Rough Guide has an ever-evolving website here.
