Category: CQAF22 Wed 4

The London African Gospel Choir (LAGC) are looking forward to their return to Belfast Cathedral Quarter.

This show sees the “redemption songs” reinterpreted; with the choir’s own inimitable African choral arrangements and Marley’s music stunningly arranged for the Choir’s band.

The London African Gospel Choir has gained international recognition for their critically acclaimed reworking of Paul Simon’s Graceland.

“Lively Up Yourselves” the great man said, welcome to a celebration to what is a part of many peoples lives, old and young…

Doors 7.30pm | Unreserved Seating 

Kathryn Joseph releases her forthcoming studio album for you who are the wronged on 22 April 2022 via Rock Action.

Unspoken truths take flight in songs that simmer and seethe with quiet anger, as Joseph gives voice to those robbed of their own. This record is a statement of abuse observed; its narrative woven with pain’s complexities, futility and stasis.

for you who are the wronged is the much anticipated follow-up to 2018’s from when i wake the want is, and her 2014 debut bones you have thrown me and blood i’ve spilled, which won 2015’s Scottish Album of the Year award.

If from when i wake… was written for love to return, this is where she fights tooth and claw to protect it. And though her sparrow-boned musical structures are as slight and sparse framed as their singer – they burn with a fearsome new certainty.

The sound is spacious, honouring the rawness of her original demos, written in early 2020. The subject matter is violation – of power, of love, of access – a pain that may not belong to her alone, but she strives to make sense of what’s being enacted on others.

In crafting these songs, Joseph offers a window into these toxic patterns that she hopes could save someone.

“Partly, it feels like the only thing I can do in terms of saying it out loud,” Kathryn shares. “It’s like code. No-one will hear their name, or recognise themselves, but in years to come, they might. For me, I think maybe there’s someone who might not even realise that they’re being abused until they listen to these songs. The ones who are already – I know how strong they are. They’re in my life, and they’re surviving it.”

Singer, guitarist, and folk music interpreter Jake Xerxes Fussell has distinguished himself as one of his generation’s preeminent interpreters of traditional (and not so traditional) “folk” songs, a practice which he approaches with a refreshingly unfussy lack of nostalgia.

By re-contextualizing ancient vernacular songs and sources of the American South, he allows them to breathe and speak for themselves and for himself; he alternately inhabits them and allows them to inhabit him.

In all his work, Fussell humanizes his material with his own profound curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways.

Fussell’s new album Good and Green Again is set for release on Jan 21, 2022 via Paradise of Bachelors. Produced by James Elkington, Good and Green Again navigates fresh sonic and compositional landscapes and is his most conceptually focused and breathtakingly rendered to-date.

Fussell and Elkington enlisted a group of formidable players hailing from Durham, North Carolina (where Fussell lives) and elsewhere, including regular bandmembers Casey Toll on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough on strings, and Nathan Golub on pedal steel.

They were joined by welcome newcomers Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone) on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Anna Jacobson on brass, and Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals.

If overall Good and Green Again sounds a little sadder and slower than Fussell’s past records, well, maybe we’re all a little sadder and slower these days.

A smoldering mood of regret and loss pervades. But three airy instrumentals, all Fussell originals, punctuate the program, offering respite and light in the form of crisp, shuffling play-party tunes, each in turn somewhat more hopeful and exuberant than the last.

Their resemblance to lullabies is, perhaps, not coincidental. Fussell and his partner welcomed their first child into the world during the making of Good and Green Again. These lovely songs bear that promise in letters of bright gold.

Doors 7.30pm | Unreserved Seating