‘canto oscuro’ by araukaaria

Araukaaria on stage. Photo by Kerttu Kruusla.

ONE THING that has always impressed me about resident Viljandi Argentine musician José Manuel Prieto Garay, better known as Pepi, is his sincerity. It can be disarming at first, it can even make you a little suspicious, put you on guard. For how could a modern person be so sincere? At what point does such sincerity become an act? But his façade of sincerity is so durable and resilient that no matter what you throw at it, it just won’t stick. There’s no winking at the camera here, no hidden double meanings, no metamodernism. Everything is what it is.

This is sort of how I approach the new song by his group Araukaaria, too. “Canto Oscuro” is disarmingly sincere. It has a cinematic quality to it — it would make a good backing track to a montage about a religious pilgrimage. Considering the story behind it — the loss of Pepi’s father, a trip to Palestine — that’s not far off the mark. Pepi recounts a roadtrip between Chile and Argentina before his father passed away years ago in telling the story. His father was very ill at that time, and could barely make the trip. This song, “Canto Oscuro” (Dark Chant) is kind of like the soundtrack to that trip composed after the fact. It passes along like a mountain road at night.

Shadowy, lofty, winding, introspective.

“I think it was clear from the beginning of the song that it was some kind of lament or requiem,” says Pepi of the song. “I wanted to visualise the journey I lived with the music and lyrics.”

Supposedly it takes about 16 hours to drive from Santiago to Buenos Aires. “Canto Oscuro” is only about six minutes long, but it feels like it could be 16 hours long. There’s enough packed in, a flute motif by Rauno Vaher at its opening, atmospheric guitar playing by Viljandi virtuoso Norbert de Varenne, backing vocals by his sister María Julia Prieto Garay and keyboardist Lisanna Kuningas, and solid contributions by Fedor Bezrukov on bass and Johannes Eriste on drums, the rhythm section of an earlier incarnation of Araukaaria. Araukaaria is one of those bands like Nine Inch Nails, that revolve around a principal songwriter and musician, but that have a revolving cast of characters, some of whom return after various scrapes and adventures (Rauno Vaher was the original drummer, and the last time I saw them, he was back on drums).

“I like to work with different people and in particular here in Estonia most of the musicians are involved in three or four projects which makes it hard to schedule and coordinate,” says Pepi. “As the project is quite a live band project, having different people always brings a new flavor.”

One of these players is Lee Taul, also of Don’t Chase the Lizard, Black Bread Gone Mad, and the Songs and Stories from Ruhnu Island project, who provides epic sweep with her violin. And another is — surprise, surprise — Tomás del Real, another Viljandi Latin American musician, this time from Chile, who helps out on something called the charango, a “small Andean stringed instrument of the lute family,” as Wikipedia informs me. He hadn’t played it in years, he says. But here it is, filling out “Canto Oscuro,” fusing Estonian and Latin elements.

“One day I was working on some other stuff and Pepi rang me up and asked, ‘Do you have time today to help me with something? I need you to record a charango in two hours,” recalls del Real. “I hadn’t played in a while but I went over there and we locked in the studio for a little bit and I made what I could,” he says. “I knew that the song was important to him and that Chile in a way plays a part, this connection between his life here and there, so I guess I was one of the pieces he needed for that track.”

As a person who also lives a life bridging continents, I know that sentiment well. At times, in the air between Europe and the Americas, I have often thought of myself as pulling thread with a needle, trying to sew two lives, one here, one there, together. It’s this sense of disorientation, of displacement that lurks in the obscured background of “Canto Oscuro.”

It is felt, even if not expressed.

“Pepi has an ability to put images in music that the listener can understand without even understanding the lyrics,” says Kuningas. “A lot of his lyrics are very visual, and he is able to put these pictures in your mind.”

Most of the song was recorded in one live take, though a few elements — the backing vocals, the charango, classical guitar — were added later. Martin Mänd of Kopi Luwak recorded “Canto Oscuro.” It was mixed and mastered by Mattias Pärt. Animation to accompany the video was created by Pepi’s sister Camila. Pepi decided to release it on February 12, his father’s birthday. “This song is connected directly to my life, my story,” he says. “It’s a snapshot of that period of my life and has helped me to heal and to let go of a very big emotional burden.”

wormslayer by kula shaker

SOMEHOW KULA SHAKER‘s new record Wormslayer crossed my desk. I was skeptical. I’ve never known what to think of this band. I was a fan in their heyday, the so-called classic period, way back at the end of the 1990s. It was good background music, driving music, with memorable melodies and interesting lyrics. But then they sort of faded away. There were new albums, but they just didn’t find their way into my heart. The original organ player Jay Darlington left the band and it felt like their best days were behind them. But a few years ago he returned and so Kula Shaker has been reborn. Wormslayer is the second album the reassembled outfit has put out and it sure is tasty and entertaining. Badly needed groove music, especially in such unstable days, psychedelia joined with elements of Indian classical music, English folk, Britpop, and even a little Manchester baggy (just listen to “Good Money“).

As I understand it, it was singer and guitarist Crispian Mills’ aim to bring more positive energy into the world with this album. Lost son Darlington helps him to achieve this noble goal, along with bassist Alonza Bevan and drummer Paul Winter-Hart. My favorite track is “Charge of the Light Brigade.” The production is thick, dense, yet shimmering, lively. The sound comes up at you from every angle. The drums are tight, the bass is flawless, and the organ holds everything together in a warm glow. Mills is also an underappreciated guitarist. According to Mills, it’s the best sound the band has ever achieved on record. Here I have to nod along and say, I agree.

An Estonian version of this review appeared in the magazine Edasi in March 2026.

‘charge of the light brigade’ by kula shaker

SOMEHOW, SOMEWAY this track crossed my desk and ears. I’ve never really known what to make of Kula Shaker. I think I heard their cover of “Hush” here and there when it came out way back when, and I had a promo copy of 1999’s Peasants, Pigs, and Astronauts that was in heavy rotation in my car when I was about 20 years old. These were the Britpop days, and Kula Shaker is an unmistakeably British band, with their raga influences about as ubiquitous as a curry shop in East London. So in a way, they are eternally linked to Oasis and Blur, even if they sound nothing like them. They arose during a creative, memorable period in British music.

Those were also the grim Radiohead days, the “Karma Police” days. For me, Peasants, Pigs, and Astronauts was a reprieve from all that seriousness and foreboding. It’s linked in my mind with the first Austin Powers film, and I do think some fembots make an appearance in the “Mystical Machine Gun” video. They were a fun band and the lyrics were just a part of the vibe. That’s nice that guitarist and singer Crispian Mills had something spiritual to say, but after could he please play that tasty guitar part again? In a way, they were a nice follow-on to Primal Scream in the “Rocks” era. Badly needed groove music penetrating the merciless Yorkean gloom.

My understanding is that Crispian caught some flak for being what we would call a nepo baby because his mother was in The Parent Trap (and I am old enough to have seen the original without having to look it up). For me, this only helped sell the band more. What better fate for the son of Hayley Mills than to become a psychedelic bard? While his name recalled Henry V’s speech at Agincourt, the rest of the band — Jay Darlington (organ), Alonza Bevan (bass), and Paul Winter-Hart (percussion) sounded like characters from an Evelyn Waugh novel. There was very little not to like about this group, and yet they remained a cultural outlier.

Which brings me to this track, “Charge of the Light Brigade,” the third on their new album Wormslayer, released at the end of January. The production is thick, dense, yet shimmering, lively. The sound comes up at you from every angle. According to the band, the whole album — which sounds like a D&D character, but is a spiritual reference to conquering negative energy — was recorded on two-inch tape. They laid this song down “Street Fighting Man” style, with just acoustic guitar and drums at first, with bleed over between both, the rest added later.

The changes are addictive and insistent and the lyrics are a shade darker. “They were all drinking blood in the shadows / drinking your blood and draining away / don’t turn your back on the shadows” and “they’re breaking the law / these masters of war / they come from behind / they don’t knock at the door.”

“The Charge of the Light Brigade was a famous 19th Century poem referring to a famous British military blunder during the Crimean War,” said Crispian Mills of his inspiration. “However, I morphed the meaning of lyrics to make it about rallying the ‘poets of light’, in a hopeless but valiant charge against the forces of darkness.”

This ain’t, “You’re a wizard in a blizzard of mystical machine gun.” This is serious ’26-level stuff. As noted, the band sounds great. The drums are spare, the bass is buoyant, flawless. The organ holds everything together in a warm glow. Mills is an underappreciated guitar player, too. Naturally, the video is recorded in an old castle or church of some kind, maybe that one on the cover of Temples’ Sun Structures. Maybe all the psychedelic cats hang out there these days?

Some friends are not yet sold on the Kula Shaker renaissance. They are skeptical of the band’s output. But with a song like this, it’s just impossible to argue that it’s not good, because it is. It’s just a good song. The best part is this: there is no self-indulgent solo. This song’s tight. Three minutes and five seconds and they’ve said what they’ve come to say and they’re done.

‘custer’ by johnny cash

AMERICAN COUNTRY GENTLEMAN Johnny Cash was feeling particularly aggrieved in 1964 and wishing to highlight the struggles of indigenous peoples in the United States, so he recorded a whole album of songs called Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian. The resulting record, released on October 1 of that year, less than a year after President Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and a month before Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory against Barry Goldwater, is often a kind of side note. I don’t remember if it came up in Walk the Line. He didn’t mention it in A Complete Unknown either, even though it had just been recorded.

But it’s a beautiful collection, with spare, percussive musical accompaniment by the Tennessee Three, Cash’s backing band, which included Luther Perkins on guitar, Marshall Grant on bass, and WS Holland on drums. Session musicians Norman Blake, who is still alive (aged 87) and Bob Johnson helped out on guitar. The best parts of the songs are the lovely backing vocal contributions of The Carter Family. I had a hard time figuring out who was singing, but certainly Johnny’s future wife June Carter was in the lead, along with Maybelle, Helen, and Anita Carter. You can hear their sublime harmonies on “As Long As The Grass Shall Grow.”

“Custer” though might be my favorite on this record, if only for Johnny Cash’s dry and comic delivery. “Custer split his men / well, he won’t do that again.” We forget that for most of the time after George Armstrong Custer‘s defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, he was considered to be an American military hero. But in the 1960s, the Lakota version of events started to win out (Custer’s widow Libbie, by the way, lived until 1933, which shows you how recent this history was.) Cash makes fine work of the legend here, though he didn’t write the song. Peter La Farge, a Greenwich Village folky regular, penned most of the songs on Bitter Tears. La Farge recorded several records of music with Native American and Western themes for Folkaways Records. La Farge died the year after Bitter Tears was released of an overdose.

Probably one of the most contentious aspects was Cash’s claim of Cherokee ancestry and accusations of being a Pretendian. On the cover of the album, his fist can be seen lifted in solidarity. Cash wears a headband, which makes him look just a little like Charlie Sheen’s character in Hot Shots. His claims of Cherokee identity were later debunked by Cash himself. He had no documented Cherokee ancestry. However, claims that he was purely of Scottish or British Isles descent are also false. A DNA test by his daughter revealed that she had African ancestry on both sides of her family, meaning that somewhere in Johnny’s “pure Scots” woodpile were some Africans. Note that this ancestry wasn’t documented either. And on Geni, at least some claim that Cash’s Hagler family from South Carolina might be linked to the Catawba Chief Hagler. So maybe Johnny was Catawba and not Cherokee. It’s certainly possible. This great record is the subject of a documentary and a tribute album too. “Custer” at two minutes and twenty-one seconds is not, maybe, the standout track, but it’s just perfect.

I remember that when Cash died in 2003, I said to a friend at that time, “But he was young, just 71 years old.” And the friend said, “But he had lived his life. He packed as much as he could into those 71 years.” I suppose after he lost June, just a few months prior, he had no reason to keep on living. But you are missed, Johnny Cash. We’re still listening to your music every single day.

‘igavene’ by sadu

THERE IS A DANGER when it comes to catchy Estonian songs. The danger is that they might become too popular. Then children’s choirs will start singing them, and they will become old ladies’ ringtones, which you overhear on trains, maybe in some place like Käru, and before you know it, you are pushing a cart down the aisle in an Estonian supermarket and you are wishing you never heard the goddamn thing! “Turn that shit off!” But, no, there shall be no such relief.

I shall not list the Estonian songs that have attained such a status, because you know exactly which ones I am referring to. But it is my sincere hope that “Igavene” by SADU never gets so far, but remains right where it is. I was sort of aware of SADU because its cofounder Sandra Sillamaa and I travel in the same circles and I was aware she was posing in various photos with the other cofounder, Sofia-Liis Liiv, but to be honest, they might as well have been promoting a lifestyle plan or deluxe shampoo. Who can pay attention to anything in this Instagram world?

But then one day I was at a friend’s house and this song came on. “Oh my god,” I thought. “It’s really good.” I have this memory of when I was about 12 years old and Achtung Baby had just come out. My friend had a small radio in his bathroom, and I slept over the house. “Mysterious Ways” came on the radio and I was hooked from those first sounds of The Edge’s guitar. I still listen to that song just to remember how tasty that guitar was the first time I heard it. Something about “Igavene” reminds me of that feeling. It’s like a delicious flavor of ice cream.

When I tried to describe the song, the words that came to mind were pop, world music, and Estonian folk. Then I read their Wikipedia entry, which states, in Estonian, “SADU is an ensemble that combines elements of folk, pop, and world music.” I am just saturated in Estonian folk music, living where I live, and honestly the runo song call and response template can get tiring, but this song reminded me of what I liked about world music, and even got me thinking about how world music leaked into the pop world. Fleeting memories of Paul Simon and his album Graceland, but also of Deep Forest (remember them?) Let’s put it this way, you could slide “Igavene” into a play list including “The Boy in the Bubble,” “Sweet Melody,” and “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles, and it would fit right in. There is something refreshing about new sounds. “Igavene” manages to make something that was familiar sound fresh.

According to Sandra, she decided in 2024 to do something new, “something with female power up front.” She began to work with Frederik Küüts on some music, partnered with Sofia-Liis Liiv, and SADU was born. “Igavene” was one of the first songs they wrote for the project. It emerged from some lyrical ideas. “Life goes by so fast and people should be bolder,” says Sandra of the song’s concept. “Igavene” by the way translates as “eternal, everlasting, perpetual, or endless.” I guess “eternal” would be the best pick. But “Everlasting” sounds fine too. The song is included in their debut album Probleemid Paradiisis (“Problems in Paradise”). The record was released in September 2025.

‘star witness’ by neko case

I WAS COMING OUT of the woods yesterday, when a plump red fox ran before me. It was less than 10 feet away, unaware (or aware) of my presence, and went ahead through a snowed-over field toward another patch of forest by the lake. I’ve seen foxes quite a few times in recent years, and have developed a kind of rapport with them. I would not yet claim them as a spiritual animal, but they are contenders. They are intelligent, cunning creatures, true friends.

The run-in with the fox reminded me of Neko Case’s outstanding 2006 album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. In the year ’06, I would harvest new albums from the library and then rip them (or their best tracks) to my PC, and then upload the MP3 to a first-generation iPod, I think. It doesn’t seem like a very long time ago in my memory, but it was almost 20 years ago. I would listen to that album on the way to and from work in Lower Manhattan. I recall cold December evenings walking in the darkness in New York and listening to my favorite song, “Star Witness,” which according to Neko Case, is about witnessing a shooting in Chicago. Somehow the song’s topic never got inside of me, it was those lovely chords and vocals.

(Sometimes I would go out and walk on the beach, with the cold sea beside me, listening to this song. I went out for such a walk when I found out my second daughter was coming.)

The song has followed me. Consider the refrain, “Hey there, there’s such tender wolves ’round town tonight.” But this is my real life. There are tender wolves lurking in the woods in Estonia. There’s something deeper at work here. Something involving foxes, wolves, and Neko Case.

The record itself was recorded in Arizona. Garth Hudson (yes, of The Band) played on it. The title was inspired by a Ukrainian folk tale. It seems Neko is one of these musicians who puts a lot of thought (or afterthought) into her song and album titles. But it’s worth reminding readers that Neko herself is of Ukrainian ancestry. I have to say, she always struck me as incredibly intimidating. Women who are about 10 years older than me are these soul-scarred, battle-hardened characters, and it’s not so easy to get close to them, because they’re like, “Then I started living on the streets and busking, after I was legally emancipated at the age of 15.” And I’m like, “Uh, can I get you a cup of coffee? Anything else I can get you, Miss Case?” Tried every drug known to man, survived scrapes with the law, leather tough. Or at least, that’s my image of her. Maybe Neko Case is marshmallow soft, but with that kind of voice, I doubt it.

‘the bat is in the tree’ by stuart ironside

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. I had the good luck to see the guitarist Stuart Ironside perform at the Pärimusmuusika Ait in Viljandi, Estonia, at the very end of November. This is the one song that I took home with me, or the one that wouldn’t leave me alone. There it was, watching me. It was hovering and flitting around me like …

… like a bat in a tree.

Ironside — yes, that’s his real name — is originally from Oxford and came up playing classical music, Oasis, and Radiohead like a loyal Briton. But he’s since ventured into something that might be called “minimalist ambient meditative guitar.” In particular, he’s drawn, especially in Estonia, to being in the presence of and reacting to nature. He goes out into the woods with his instrument and listens to the trees talk and he talks back at them with his strings. There’s an almost monastic devotion to this experiment, as he communes in his sensitive, musical way. As such, the forest sounds on this recording, available on his new record Music from Somewhere Else: The Enclosure, were recorded in Vääna-Jõesuu, a beachside village to the west of Tallinn. Ironside recorded “The Bat is in the Tree” and other songs in a sauna there. This is not music designed to sound like something. It is that something, captured in the raw.

Ironside made a first attempt at the song in London in 2023. “I had the main riff at the start of the song for a few months, but didn’t know where it would go,” he recalls. “I refined it over a few years and live performances, with an emphasis on trying to ring as much emotion out of as few notes as possible.” Ironside also tried to emulate West African lutes like the xalam and koni for “The Bat is in the Tree,” but also drew upon both British and Estonian folk. The result is a satisfying and pretty listening experience. This is the kind of music you listen to at the start or end of the days, when you put your legs up on the bed, breathe out, stare at the ceiling and close your eyes, trying, perhaps in vain, to forget the tiring agony of the world.

‘let’s go together’ by paul kantner and jefferson starship

IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING, no, this is not the Starship that put out “We Built This City.” Blows Against the Empire (1970) was a collaborative record arranged and composed mostly by Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner with lots of Woodstock Nation friends, including Grace Slick, Jorma and Peter Kaukonen, Jack Casady, Graham Nash, David Crosby, Jerry Garcia, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and many more. It’s very similar to Crosby’s solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name from around the same time. (Kantner and Crosby, before there ever were Byrds or Airplane, used to play guitars in Los Angeles on the beach and smoke pot).

I like the piano on this track, played by Grace Slick, which gives its sparse, almost hollow sound. Her vocals are also great, at times, with her voice, you can’t tell if it’s her or a guitar hovering in the back. Paul Kantner plays guitar, sings, and also helps out with some kind of “bass synthesizer,” whatever that was. Jerry Garcia plays the banjo and Kreutzmann is the drummer. And that’s it for this one. What a weird lineup. Kantner/Slick/Garcia/Kreutzmann? Who knew that such musical combinations even existed. Slick is now 86 and Kreutzmann is 79. The others, Paul and Jerry, are up on that big starship in the sky.

Lyrically, it picks up where they left off with “Wooden Ships,” a Kantner co-creation. “Say goodbye to America, say hello to the garden.” Utopian fantasies about sailing off into space with hippies. Imagine a world of David Crosbys and Grace Slicks. What a world that would be. Like, all our problems would be solved, man!

‘robert f. kennedy’ by the ethiopians

I HAVE DECIDED to create a new series that I call New Track. I was going to call it New Track of the Week, but I am not sure if I will write about a new track every week. What if I want to write about one every two weeks? Or if I want to write about two new tracks in one week? New Track of the Week would be limiting. That’s why this series is just called New Track.

New Track features a new track. It’s a new song I have discovered that I would like to write about and share with the world. In this way, I can feature all kinds of music. In particular, I would like to write about local artists in Estonia who are connected to Viljandi in some way, but not exclusively. Rather, I’d just like to write about whatever I happen to be listening to. And today’s new (inaugural) track is ‘Robert F. Kennedy ‘ by a Jamaican outfit called The Ethiopians.

How did I discover this track? I was in a record store in Amsterdam and was looking at a Don Drummond record. Don Drummond was a Jamaican ska trombonist and integral member of the famous group The Skatalites. A lot of great Jamaican recordings from the 1960s were released as 45s, and so many are now available in various compilations. So, it was through exploring these compilations that I came upon this breezy recording, “Robert F. Kennedy.”

Learning about Jamaican groups can be complex. Often I try to find out who the bass player was on some sessions only to be led down the rabbit hole. This 2:04 song was recorded about a year after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (who would have been 100 years old on November 20, which also happens to be my birthday). The song is also credited to the Sir JJ All Stars. The Ethiopians were a popular vocal harmony group in Jamaica and in 1969 released an album called Reggae Power on the Sir JJ label run by producer Karl Johannes “J.J.” Johnson. “Robert F. Kennedy” is an instrumental track off that record.

But who was in the Sir JJ house band? It consisted of Bobby Aitken (guitar), Winston Richards (drums), Vincent White (bass), Alphonso Henry (alto sax), Val Bennett (tenor sax), Dave Parks (trombone), Mark Lewis (trumpet), Bobby Kalphat (keyboards), and someone called “Iron Sprat” (bongos). At least I think it did. Of the group, at least Vincent White is still around and playing. Here’s an interview with him recorded in July.