Waterduction

One of Poland's outstanding musical exports, Warsaw Village Band follow their return-to-roots set, Mazovian Roots Re:action, with something of a concept album. In Waterduction, they follow the flow and take to the waters of life, tradition and the Vistula River, and geographically the Urzecze, an ethnographic micro-region that extends between both banks of the Vistula near Warsaw.

‘The river with its tributaries is like part of the bloodstream… We wanted to capture it in music,' says singer and fiddler player Sylwia Świątkowska, one of the three female Village leaders, whose soaring vocal harmonies are as much the album's sound signature as its knotty percussion and bony cimbalom. Joining forces with Kraków poet and vocalist Marcin Świetlicki, WVB hit a broad and deep current, with these nine rich, atmospheric, immersive songs embracing dark water, flowing water, the allure and otherness of water. The brief, eerie opener ‘Beauty’, and closing song ‘Water Lullaby’, are stunners, the musical shores between which the rest of the album flows. ‘Water Invocation’ rises from ominous bass drum to waves of vocal harmonies, while brass and cimbalom eddy and flow through the keening vocals of ‘Drowned Bride’. It's otherworldly, transporting, deep and wide. Dive in if you know what's good for you.