Firewater's lefty, polyglobal grooves

This one ran last week, too, still catching up...it's another Firewater album from ex-Cop Shoot Cop honcho Tod A.

Firewater
International Orange
Bloodshot

Tod A. (it stands for Ashley), the frontman for Firewater (and one-time leader of Cop Shoot Cop), spent the interim between 2008’s Golden Hour and this year’s International Orange saving a rainforest in Cambodia and, later, setting up a permanent base in Istanbul. No longer living out of a backpack (as he was for Golden Hour), the peripatetic Ashley seems to have settled into a Middle Eastern-flavored groove.


His latest record, recorded against the backdrop of the Arab Spring and released on the anniversary of 9/11, plunges gleefully into a mash of influences: Anatolian zurna wails and Persian percussion, American jazz trombone slides and walking bass, Latin brass, ska-twitching upbeats and the rough-housing melodic punk of the early 1980s. Not since Strummer’s Global A Go Go have so many cultures been shoe-horned together in the service of politically-engaged pub rock.

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Now this looks like fun.


Been thinking about Global A Go Go ever since...