Before ska, rocksteady, reggae, or dub, there was mento. The Jamaican musical style grew from an encounter between African and European traditions, and its banjos, guitars, hand percussion, and rumba boxes accompanied dancing, drinking, storytelling, and songs about life\u2019s daily irritations. But 70 years after its heyday, mento\u2019s place in Caribbean popular music has now become marginal, as the global prominence of styles that came after mento has tended to make the earlier genre seem like merely a prelude.<\/p>\n
June McDoom<\/a>\u2019s debut album, Follow the Light, is a revivification of mento as well as a memento of her family history. Her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a professional mento musician who played banjo and built rumba boxes. As a child, McDoom absorbed the music when she saw him perform at family parties; at the same time, she was developing a musical consciousness of her own through listening to folk music, with Simon & Garfunkel<\/a> among her early favorites. On Follow the Light, she marries her inherited and acquired musical traditions with style, grace, and ingenuity.<\/p>\n No score yet, be the first to add.<\/p>\n McDoom\u2019s songs find a resonance between Jamaican styles, especially dub and mento, and the forms that emerged from \u201970s folk as it mutated into acid folk, prog, and psychedelia. Rather than preserving folk\u2019s association with the acoustic and the nontechnological, McDoom exposes its sounds to dub\u2019s electronic manipulation, cracking open the arrangements with spring reverb and spongy synths\u2014a smart way to ensure the songs don\u2019t become a goofy folk period piece.<\/p>\n Working with her frequent collaborator Evan Wright, McDoom builds her arrangements from nylon-string guitar and voice. Her acid-folk and chamber-pop influences supply harp, flute, harpsichord, and strings, while the Jamaican influences bring low frequencies, echo, and electronic manipulation to her organic sounds. The resulting sensorium never sounds overly fussy or strained for virtuosity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before ska, rocksteady, reggae, or dub, there was mento. The Jamaican musical style grew from an encounter between…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[692,93,61,60,278,514],"class_list":["post-674448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}